Terry Pratchett

Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English author, humorist, and satirist, born on 28 April 1948 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and died on 12 March 2015 at the age of 66. He became one of the most widely read British writers of his time, especially in the 1990s, when he was the UK’s best-selling author. His books sold more than 100 million copies worldwide in 43 languages, a scale that matched the speed at which he worked: after the first Discworld book appeared, he wrote an average of two books a year.

Pratchett is best known for the Discworld series, 41 comic fantasy novels published between 1983 and 2015. The first, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983; the last, The Shepherd’s Crown, appeared in August 2015, five months after his death. He also co-wrote the apocalyptic comedy novel Good Omens with Neil Gaiman in 1990. His first novel, The Carpet People, had been published in 1971, followed by The Dark Side of the Sun in 1976 and Strata in 1981.

His path to writing began early and unevenly. Pratchett was the only child of David Pratchett, a mechanic, and Eileen Pratchett, a secretary, and his maternal grandparents came from Ireland. At Holtspur School he was bullied for his speech impediments, and he later said the head teacher believed a child’s later success could be judged by reading and writing at the age of six. Pratchett thought differently. In his Who’s Who entry, he credited his education to the Beaconsfield Public Library.

As a boy he was drawn to astronomy, collected Brooke Bond tea cards about space, owned a telescope, and wanted to become an astronomer, though he lacked the mathematics. He read H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and “every book you really ought to read,” later calling that “getting an education.” At High Wycombe Technical High School he joined the debating society and wrote for the school magazine. His story “The Hades Business” appeared there when he was 13 and was published commercially when he was 15. At 17 he left school to become an apprentice journalist at the Bucks Free Press.

Journalism trained Pratchett in daily writing. He wrote more than 80 stories for the Children’s Circle section under the name Uncle Jim, and later worked in several journalism posts before becoming press officer for the South West Region of the Central Electricity Generating Board in 1979. He left that job in 1987, after finishing the fourth Discworld novel, Mort, to write full time. Recognition followed: he was appointed OBE in 1998, knighted for services to literature in 2009, won the Carnegie Medal in 2001 for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, and received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2010.

In December 2007 Pratchett announced that he had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He later made a substantial public donation to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, filmed three BBC television programmes about his experience of the condition, and became a patron of the organization. His words continue to be read because they join comic fantasy with satire, sharp observation, and a working writer’s discipline. From school magazines to Discworld, he made imagined worlds feel busy, funny, and human.