Thomas Brezina

Brezina has received numerous awards for his work, including the “Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria” and the most important Austrian TV award Romy for the educational program Forscherexpress (“Researcher’s Express”).

He has been married to Dutch painter, Ivo Belajic, since 2017.

In 2017 Brezina designed the Visitors Area for Vienna International Airport, a multimedia experience for kids as well as adults.

Other book series followed, such as No Boys! – Witches Only, Pssst! Our Secret! or Seven Paws for Penny. The heroine of the Penny books lives on a farm and, in the series' first title (What is a dog's life, after all?), saves a dog from being killed. The "seven paws" of the title refers to Penny's dogs; one has four white paws and one has three white paws and a black one. His adventure-series A Case for You and the Tiger-Team was a big international success, particularly in China, where the series overtook Harry Potter in terms of sales numbers at certain points.

The books by Brezina also spawned movies and television-series (for example The Knickerbocker Gang: The talking tomb and Tom Turbo – From 0 to 111), theatre-plays, musicals (for example Ritter Rups und der Pirat Kartoffelsalat (Knight Rups and captain Potato Salad)), radio plays and interactive videogames. Furthermore, he was involved in the conception of textbooks for schools, wrote and presented a number of educational videos about famous composers and wrote an interactive series of art books for children (Museum of Adventures). The series A MINI-Case for You and the Tiger-Team (an adaptation of the Tiger-Team adventures for younger readers) and Liz Kiss (a story about a girl becoming a ninja-superheroine) are his latest new works in the field of children's books.

In 2008, Brezina and his company Tower10 relaunched the children's program of ORF, rebranded it under the name of okidoki and are responsible for the program since then. As a part of that, Brezina presented and still presents a couple of formats, most notable 7 Wunder (7 Wonders), Trickfabrik (Trick Factory) and Genau so geht’s (That's How It Goes).

Brezina lives in Vienna and London. Privately he engages in charities for disadvantaged children and became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for Austria in 1996. For his 50th birthday he took a children's sponsorship for Light for the World and he is currently engaged as a testimonial for Austrian NGO Volkshilfe.

In Austria, one of his most famous TV shows is the detective series Tom Turbo / Tom Turbo Detective Club. The interactive show features Tom, a talking bicycle with 111 tricks and young detectives catching clumsy crooks and solving mysteries together with the audience in front of the TV. The series was shot at memorable locations throughout Austria and is still running since the first episode aired in 1993.

His breakthrough as a writer occurred in 1990 with the series The Knickerbocker Gang. Three years later the book series Tom Turbo followed – a detective-series about the “world’s smartest bicycle” – which was later adapted for TV as an interactive children's program. Since 2008 Brezina is responsible for the children's program okidoki, broadcast on ORF eins.

Overall Brezina wrote more than 550 books, some of which have been translated into more than 35 languages. With about 40 million sold copies, he is one of the most successful German-language children's and youth book authors. Through his work on a variety of screenplays, Brezina got an offer to write books from German-based Breitschopf-Verlag. His first series was The Knickerbocker Gang in 1990 – detective stories about a gang of four kids solving mysteries with brains. The series was also made into a musical, a play, a movie and a television series in 1995 and 1996.

Thomas C. Brezina (born 30 January 1963 in Vienna) is an Austrian writer of children's books and TV-Presenter. He is especially known for his series The Knickerbocker Gang, A Case for You and the Tiger-Team and his stories about the talking bike Tom Turbo. He has published over 550 books and his work has been translated into 35 languages.