Philip Pullman

Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman, born in Norwich on 19 October 1946, is an English writer whose career runs from the early 1970s into the 2020s. He is best known for the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, a work that brought together adventure, poetry, myth, and moral argument for readers young and old. In 2019, he was knighted in the New Year Honours for services to literature, and he has also received several honorary doctorates and other honours.

Pullman’s childhood was marked by loss, movement, and stories. His grandfather was a Church of England rector and gave him a love of storytelling. His father, Alfred Outram Pullman, was a Royal Air Force pilot who died in a plane crash in Kenya in 1954, when Pullman was seven, and was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. His mother later remarried a friend of his father, also an RAF pilot, and the family moved to North Wales. Pullman remembered his mother reading him Kipling’s Just So Stories, and he later said that Kipling’s rhythms must have entered his memory.

Books, comics, and poetry shaped his imagination early. His favorite childhood book was Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Three Twins, and he later connected its effect on him to the fact that, like Emil, he had a widowed mother. He enjoyed Superman, Batman, and Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin. At school in Harlech, he heard older students reciting T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” and realized poetry would matter to him. John Milton’s Paradise Lost later became a major influence on His Dark Materials. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Allen Ginsberg, William Blake, and Bob Dylan also fed his thinking and writing.

Pullman studied at Exeter College, Oxford, receiving a Third Class BA in 1968. He married Judith Speller in 1970, and they have two sons. Around that time he began teaching children aged 9 to 13 at Bishop Kirk Middle School in Summertown, North Oxford, where he wrote school plays and retold classics for his students, including the Iliad and the Odyssey. His debut novel, The Haunted Storm, appeared in 1972 and was joint-winner of the New English Library’s Young Writer’s Award. His school plays helped lead to his first children’s book, Count Karlstein, in 1982.

After The Ruby in the Smoke was published in 1985, Pullman stopped teaching. That Victorian mystery opened the Sally Lockhart quartet, followed by The Shadow in the North, The Tiger in the Well, and The Tin Princess. He taught part-time at Westminster College, Oxford, between 1988 and 1996, while continuing to write. He began His Dark Materials in about 1993. Northern Lights appeared in 1995 and won the Carnegie Medal, later the “Carnegie of Carnegies.” The Amber Spyglass, published in 2000, won the Whitbread Award. In 2017 he began the companion trilogy The Book of Dust, whose final novel, The Rose Field, was published in October 2025.

Pullman became a full-time writer in 1996, while continuing to give talks and write occasionally for The Guardian, including criticism of unimaginative education policies. He received a CBE in 2004, the same year he became President of the Blake Society. Michael Morpurgo, the Children’s Literature Laureate, called him “the Tolkien of our day,” pointing to the range and depth of his imagination and learning. Pullman’s words continue to find readers because they carry the sounds of poetry, the drive of story, and a lifelong argument for taking young readers seriously.