Martina Wildner
The stories behind the stories

Martina Wildner has been writing successful children’s and young adult novels for years, and the film adaptation of her award-winning novel “Das schaurige Haus” (The Scary House) climbed the worldwide Netflix film charts to spot five in 2021. Yet, her path to becoming a writer took a few twists and turns.
 

By Romy König

Martina Wildner has tried her hand at a lot of things. She has experimented with sculpting in internships, studied Islamic studies for a few semesters at the University of Erlangen, and also spent several months in Damascus, Syria. As a 23-years-old, she decided to major in graphic design, more precisely illustration, and graduated from Nuremberg Tech in 1996.

She immediately went freelance as an illustrator – and as a writer. Wildner quickly realised that she preferred to write the books she illustrated. At some point, she told the “Bücher leben!” literature portal, the written pieces “grew longer” and developed a life of their own without illustrations.

Today, the author can look back on a successful career of more than a dozen books published for children and young adults, and on a number of awards. Her novel Jede Menge Sternschnuppen (Shooting Stars Everywhere) won the 2003 Peter Härtling Prize, and the book Königin des Sprungturms (Queen of the Diving Platform) took the 2014 Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (German Youth Literature Prize).

Horror in Allgäu

Since 2012, Wildner has increasingly turned to horror stories: Her Allgäu-Grusel-Trilogie (Creepy Allgäu Trilogy), as she calls it on her website, deals with children worried about mutating into trees, with eerie houses, and with terrifying lakes. Her novel Das schaurige Haus (The Scary House) from the series was not only nominated for a Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 2012, but also made it onto the silver screen. In 2021, the adaptation of the novel took fifth place in the worldwide Netflix film rankings.

Clarity and sophistication

Martina Wildner has moved on since then. In her latest book, Der Himmel über dem Platz (The Sky Above the Pitch), published in February 2021, she tackles gender stereotypes and tells the story of a girl who desperately wants to play professional football on a boys’ team. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported the book was primarily about how it felt “to not be part of a community”. The newspaper praised it as “profound” and “poetically clear”, presented from the point of view of a first-person narrator who actually “thinks, speaks, and, above all, has questions and doubts, as thirteen-year-olds do.” According to the FAZ, with Martina Wildner, it is always the stories behind the actual story that “make her writing special”.