Michael Ende

Ende's father Edgar was a surrealist painter whose work the regime banned, and the son grew up in Munich watching that persecution close up. He drifted through acting and theatre criticism before Jim Knopf made him a children's writer. Momo, about a girl resisting grey men who steal people's time, and The Neverending Story, about a bullied boy who reads himself into a dying world, both work as arguments against a life measured only by efficiency. He detested Wolfgang Petersen's 1984 film of the second book, went to court to have his name taken off it, lost, and called the result kitsch. He lived for years in Italy and died in 1995.