Michael Ende was born in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the Bavarian Alps, the only child of the painter Edgar Ende, whose dreamlike, surrealist pictures were condemned by the Nazis as “degenerate art.” Growing up in a house where imagination was a kind of resistance left its mark on everything he wrote.

He trained as an actor in Munich after the war, wrote cabaret sketches and film reviews, and was not making much of a living when a friend asked him to write a few words for a picture book. The few words grew into Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, about a little boy who arrives on an island in a parcel and sets off with a railway engineer and his locomotive to see the world. Around a dozen publishers turned it down. When it was finally published, in 1960, it won Germany’s top prize for children’s books.

In 1970 Ende moved to Italy, to a village in the hills outside Rome. There he wrote Momo (1973), about a little girl who lives in the ruins of an amphitheater and has one great gift: she knows how to listen. When gray men in gray suits come to town and persuade everyone to “save time” by depositing it in their bank, only Momo can win it back. It is a fable about the hurry of modern life, and it feels truer every year.

The Neverending Story came out in 1979. A lonely, bullied boy named Bastian steals a book from an antiquarian bookshop, hides in his school’s attic to read it, and is gradually drawn into the land of Fantastica, which is being swallowed by the Nothing and can only be saved by a human child. In the original edition, the story was printed in two colors, red for Bastian’s world and green for Fantastica, so that readers could watch the boundary between them blur.

The book became a worldwide bestseller. Ende was so unhappy with the 1984 film, which dropped the second half of his story, that he asked to have his name taken off it. He died in 1995. His books have been translated into more than forty languages, and they still say what Ende believed: that imagination is not an escape from the world but a way of saving it.