Eva Ibbotson has already settled on her epitaph: “She took trouble”. She regards herself as “an entertainer, a craftsperson, a master baker” - a writer who cares for the skill of writing, who rewrites “as often as if I was Tolstoy”. She likes to think of her books, she says, as a “nice present to give the reader” and adds: “The best sort of present you can give a child is something they can walk into and enjoy, something that makes them laugh - and cry - and introduces them to exciting places.”

Ibbotson makes an art of her nice presents. She is a champion of happy endings, of books full of good old-fashioned adventure and clear structures with beginnings, middles and positive resolutions. Such clarity and optimism stands very much outside today’s fashion for conceptual complexity, the layering of stories, offering readers choice but no closure. Her taste for “romance” in books, by which she means the “enchantment” of everyday life, could not be more different from the trend for dissecting the trials of life in today’s society.

At the age of 76, she has finally won acclaim for her persistent clarity and wit, and her ability to create wonderfully outlandish and memorable characters. After almost 40 years of writing short stories for women’s magazines (The Lady, Woman’s Journal and Good Housekeeping), romantic novels for adults and funny books about witches and wizards for children, she has finally received a Smarties gold award and been shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year for Journey to the River Sea (Macmillan Children’s Books pound;9.99).

This latest novel, which critics say is her breakthrough book for children (reviewed in Primary magazine, July 2001) is a beautifully realised, uplifting adventure for Year 4 readers and above, about an orphan girl, Maia. In 1910, accompanied by her strict but astute governess, Miss Minton, Maia makes an extraordinary journey from England to the Amazon to live with distant relatives. They turn out to be cruel, but Maia’s loyalty, intelligence and generosity see her through. This is an intensely visual account, full of the colours of South America and some of its incongruous landmarks, such as the green and gold opera house at Manaus. “A friend who had visited Brazil told me about this fantastic opera house,” the author says. “I was struck by the fact that it should exist with the jungle just down the road. That kind of juxtaposition interests me.”

She says the book’s imagery is heightened precisely because she has never been to the Amazon and had to recreate that world for herself. In her months of research, she read the great South American explorers, some in Portuguese, and drew on the work of Alan Ibbotson, her husband, who died three years ago, a deeply committed biologist and naturalist. Above all, it is a warm, glowing story of hope: the kind of “present” Ibbotson likes to give. “Children deserve the old-fashioned principles about goodness and badness that are present in romantic adventure, not in a preachy way, but through a structure they can identify with.”

As a child she found Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and the novels of R L Stevenson offered oases of hope and escape in a turbulent, nomadic existence. Born in Vienna to Austrian parents who separated when she was three, she was brought up mostly by a grandmother and eccentric aunts (outrageous aunts figure largely in many of her books for children). She remembers endless train journeys between parents: her mother was a writer who worked with Brecht in Berlin and moved on to Paris; her father a Jewish scientist who escaped persecution by finding work in Edinburgh.

When the family eventually settled in England, Eva was sent to Dartington Hall, the progressive boarding school, where she mixed with the children of Bertrand Russell and Sigmund Freud. Amid opportunities for radicalism, she craved certainty. “I can remember crying out ‘Don’t tell me I can do what I like, tell me what I have to do’.” When her father insisted she opt for a future in science, she chose physiology at Cambridge “which I hated, cutting up all those poor animals”.

Later, marriage and four children supplied the secure home base she wanted, for more than 40 years in Newcastle upon Tyne, where she still lives. “I have seen a lot of unhappy endings,” she says. “I lost my parents, my home, my country. I have seen a lot of anguish. I could have written about that sort of thing. But I want children to feel that life is OK, and I taught myself to write well because I know what deep pleasure books can bring.”

Her quick, dry humour is an irresistible hook for the reader. “Jews have a saying: when you are unhappy you laugh and when you are hungry you sing,” she says. “I think that is good, to make things funny rather than hurtful.”

She started writing “for some pocket money” when her children were young, starting with an article she submitted to The Lady. Her first children’s book, Which Witch?, was published in 1979. Since then she has written 14 children and adult books. The Secret at Platform 13, about a doorway at King’s Cross station that opens into a magic world, was written long before the Harry Potter novels. Ibbotson believes that J K Rowling “has taken witches and wizards to the end point”, and adds: “She has opened the book world out and crossed the division between adult and children’s books. That is what I hope to achieve with Journey to the River Sea.”

And by bringing romance back on to the literary stage, Ibbotson is perhaps being more radical than she would ever admit.

The winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year Award, which is also eligible for the main Whitbread prize, will be announced on January 22. Also shortlisted are Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer (Viking), The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (Scholastic Press) and The Lady and the Squire by Terry Jones (Pavilion)