Eoin Colfer

Eoin Colfer (born 1965) is an Irish author of children's and adult fiction, best known for the Artemis Fowl series about a twelve-year-old criminal mastermind. He was born in Wexford on 14 May 1965.

He studied at university in Dublin and worked as a primary school teacher, spending 1992 to 1996 working in Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Italy. His first book, Benny and Omar (1998), drew on his time in Tunisia. Artemis Fowl was published on 26 April 2001 by Viking in Britain and Ireland, with Puffin paperbacks, and by Miramax in the United States. Its success let him give up teaching. Seven sequels followed: The Arctic Incident (2002), The Eternity Code (2003), The Opal Deception (2005), The Lost Colony (2006), The Time Paradox (2008), The Atlantis Complex (2010) and The Last Guardian (2012). A spin-off trilogy, The Fowl Twins, began in 2019, and a Disney film adaptation appeared in 2020.

His other books include The Supernaturalist (2004), Half Moon Investigations (2006), the Legends and W.A.R.P. series, the Daniel McEvoy crime novels Plugged (2011) and Screwed (2013), and the adult fantasy Highfire (2020). At the request of Douglas Adams's estate he wrote And Another Thing... (2009), a sixth Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel. He was Laureate na nÓg, Ireland's Children's Laureate, from 2014 to 2016.

For collectors, the 2001 Viking hardback of Artemis Fowl is the first edition of his breakthrough book. The series had sold more than 21 million copies in 44 languages by 2013.