Eoin Colfer

Eoin Colfer is an Irish author born in 1965 in Wexford, the son of a teacher and historian and a drama teacher, who worked as a primary school teacher himself before writing full-time. His first novel, Benny and Omar (1998), drew on time he had spent teaching in Tunisia, but it was Artemis Fowl (2001) that made his name: a fast, funny caper series about a twelve-year-old criminal-mastermind heir who kidnaps a fairy for ransom, only to collide with a fully modern, technologically advanced hidden fairy civilization. Across eight books, Colfer let his genuinely amoral young antihero develop a conscience without ever losing his edge, mixing heist-thriller plotting with an irreverent humor that set the series apart from its more earnest fantasy peers. The main series concluded with Artemis Fowl and the Last Guardian (2012); Colfer later returned to the world with a separate spinoff trilogy, The Fowl Twins, following Artemis's much younger brothers. New readers should start with the original Artemis Fowl rather than the twins' books or the 2020 Disney film adaptation, which reshuffles major plot points and isn't considered a faithful version by most fans. Colfer served as Ireland's official children's laureate, Laureate na nÓg, from 2014 to 2016, and continues to write across multiple series and age groups.