COLFER, Eoin

Author; b 14 May 1965; s of Billy and Noreen Colfer; m 1991, Jacqueline. Educ: Carysfort Coll. of Educn (BEd). Teacher: Scoil Mhuire Primary Sch., Wexford, 1986-94; Jeddah Private Acad., Saudi Arabia, 1994-95; Internat. Sch. of Martina Franca, Italy, 1995-96; Sfat Internat. Sch., Tunisia, 1996-98; Scoil Mhuire Primary Sch., 1998-2002. Publications: Benny and Omar, 1998; Benny and Babe, 1999; Going Potty, 1999; The Wish List, 2000; Ed’s Funny Feet, 2000; Ed’s Bed, 2001; Artemis Fowl, 2001; The Arctic Incident, 2002; The Eternity Code, 2003; Spud Murphy, 2004; The Supernaturalist, 2004.

EOIN COLFER’s meteoric rise in the world of children’s fiction since the publication of the first best-selling Artemis Fowl adventure in 2001 surprises few who have read his work.

The former primary school teacher from Wexford, Ireland combines high-concept ideas that are a staple of Hollywood thrillers with immense charm, talent and wit.

Now 39, he hit on the idea of the series, famously described as “Die Hard with fairies”, as a result of his love of comic books, pulp TV shows like Hill Street Blues and a deep knowledge of Irish folk tales about the “little people”. Colfer’s fairies, far from being the wispy type, are vastly more technologically advanced than Mud People (that’s us).

Much of their apparently magical powers such as invisibility or flight are due to technical ingenuity, and leprechauns are in fact part of LEPrecon, an elite police reconnaissance unit designed to prevent humans from discovering fairy existence deep in the Earth’s core. Up against them is an anti-hero that children adore: the 12-year-old Artemis Fowl. Brilliant, arrogant, coldly amoral and wickedly funny, Artemis is bent on restoring his family’s fortunes with the help of a devoted Oddjob-style butler and some technological wizardry of his own.

Artemis is evolving into a warmer character, but Colfer drew on his experiences during a year teaching English in a private school in Saudi Arabia to depict the psychology of a rich kid with a bad attitude. He and his wife Jackie were teaching the children of the Saudi elite, including a couple of princes, and discovered that there, respect is given only to the rich.

As a teacher, he was, he says, “lower than a goldfish”. The boys would get pizzas delivered while in class, and still expect to be given As. Colfer failed many of them, to the dismay of the school principal and the delight of the parents. The “guilty pleasure of writing about a little bad guy” was born then, although Colfer wrote four other children’s books before creating Artemis, the first mortal to crack the fairy codebook in order to obtain the fabled crock of gold.

Like his other books, Artemis Fowl was written in the evenings in 2000 after teaching at Coolcotts National School in Wexford town. This time, however, his wife told him he had done something different. He sent the manuscript to Sophie Hicks at Ed Victor, not expecting it to sell any more than the 3,000 copies he was used to selling in Ireland. Colfer was on playground duty when he learnt that three Hollywood studios had bid for the rights, and that it had gone to Miramax for a sum rumoured to be a million dollars. With all the pace and inventiveness of a great PlayStation game, his trilogy (a fourth is coming out in May) stands out because of the edgy relationships between its feisty fairy, Holly, the paranoid centaur-inventor Foaly, the irascible LEPrecon police commander Root, and Artemis, boy genius and criminal mastermind.

“When I started to write I had no intention of making Artemis the central character, he was just the bad guy Holly was up against and that was it,” says Colfer. “My real anxiety was whether readers would want to go on reading about someone they were meant to hate. But then bits of myself started to go in, and he developed a conscience and it became a very interesting book to write. I’ve always liked the bad guys best in films.” Though banned, as were J. K.

Rowling and Philip Pullman, in American schools promoting fundamentalist Christianity, he is an intensely moral writer.

Some adults object to the fast-paced action and knockabout violence of his tales, but Colfer’s Catholic upbringing is particularly evident in an early novel, The Wish List, about a teenaged girl who must atone for her sins on Earth in order to join her dead mother in Heaven. Less slapstick than Roddy Doyle, Colfer shares his sense of family dynamics and shows Artemis’s arrogance as lonely and pitiable. The second of five children, all boys, Colfer was taught by his own father, who was an inspired teacher of the arts and understood the appeal of the quixotic and eccentric.

Living in Wexford, with its famous opera festival and stable of Irish novelists such as John Banville and Colm Tóibín, made writing seem “like a good, honourable and normal thing to do”. The international success of the three Artemis Fowl novels, with a Miramax film due next year, have not changed Colfer.

“I still walk down a street and pick up an interesting leaf for an art class,” he says, having given up his teaching commitments only four months ago. “It never leaves you.”

As a teacher of ten to 12-year-olds, Colfer took a keen interest in what his pupils would read, noting that they liked the Goosebumps series by R. L. Stine because they were short and very accessible. When he himself began to write a story about an Irish boy and a Tunisian, Danny and Omar, he took care to have a good vocabulary but also to keep the first four chapters fast-moving to hook the reader.

This structure continues: the most recent Artemis Fowl book begins with a shoot-out in a posh restaurant, and The Supernaturalists, a dystopian futuristic adventure published in 2004, has two orphan boys making a break for freedom from their orphanage, which uses them to test commercial products. There are a lot of ideas about art, communism, religion and physics subtly woven into the action, as well as a strong environmental consciousness. But it is Colfer’s sense of humour which, even more than his dazzlingly inventive imagination, has earned him a place in children’s hearts.

“I’m delighted to be in Who’s Who, but for me, the big thing is being able to call myself a writer,” he says. “Before, it was just a hobby.”

AMANDA CRAIG

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