Terry Pratchett

Terence David John Pratchett was born on April 28, 1948, in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, the only child of David Pratchett, a mechanic, and Eileen Pratchett ^[1]. He later described an ordinary rural childhood spent partly in the village of Forty Green, and he credited his mother with pushing him to read. By his own account he was an indifferent student until he discovered Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows around the age of ten, after which he became a compulsive reader who worked his way through the local library ^[2].

He attended High Wycombe Technical High School, having chosen it over the local grammar school. There he published his first short story, "The Hades Business", in the school magazine in 1961. Two years later, when he was fifteen, a revised version appeared in the professional magazine Science Fantasy, and he used the payment to buy a typewriter ^[1]. The teenage Pratchett was already immersed in science fiction fandom, attending conventions and reading the genre magazines of the period.

Rather than finish his A levels and go to university, Pratchett left school in 1965 to take a job as a trainee reporter on the Bucks Free Press, a local newspaper. Journalism gave him a daily discipline of writing to length and deadline, and the paper's children's section, for which he wrote short serial stories under a pseudonym, gave him a regular outlet for invention ^[3]. Terry Pratchett facts often begin with the Discworld, but the newsroom apprenticeship shaped his working habits for the rest of his life.

While still a young reporter, Pratchett interviewed Peter Bander van Duren, a director of the small publisher Colin Smythe Ltd, and mentioned that he had written a novel. That book, The Carpet People, a comic fantasy about tiny people living in the fibres of a carpet, was published by Colin Smythe in 1971 ^[1]. Two science fiction novels followed: The Dark Side of the Sun in 1976 and Strata in 1981, the latter already featuring a flat, disc shaped world.

Through these years writing remained a sideline. Pratchett moved between regional newspapers, including the Western Daily Press and the Bath Chronicle, then left journalism in 1980 to become a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board, with responsibility for an area that included several nuclear power stations ^[3]. He later joked that he had held the job through the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident, which made him hard to rattle.

The turning point came in 1983 with The Colour of Magic, the first Discworld novel, which followed the inept wizard Rincewind and the naive tourist Twoflower across a world balanced on four elephants and the star turtle Great A'Tuin ^[2]. A BBC radio serialisation helped the book find an audience, and Corgi issued the paperback in 1985. After The Light Fantastic appeared in 1986 and sales kept climbing, Pratchett gave up the press office in 1987 to write full time ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Terry Pratchett in the late 1980s would have received a simple answer: the fastest rising name in British fantasy.

The Discworld grew into one of the most sustained achievements in modern popular fiction: 41 novels published between 1983 and 2015, translated into dozens of languages and selling tens of millions of copies worldwide ^[4]. What began as parody of sword and sorcery conventions matured into satire of the real world, with recurring story strands built around the witches of Lancre, the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork, the personification of Death, and the scheming Patrician Lord Vetinari. Novels such as Mort (1987), Guards! Guards! (1989), Small Gods (1992) and Night Watch (2002) took on religion, policing, war, the press and banking while remaining, first of all, funny.

During the 1990s Pratchett was frequently described as Britain's best selling living novelist, a position he held until J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books overtook him ^[2]. He was also a persistent target of shoplifters: booksellers reported his titles among the most stolen in the country, a statistic he treated as a backhanded compliment. Alongside the main sequence he wrote Good Omens (1990) with Neil Gaiman, a comic novel about the apocalypse that became a cult favourite and, long after, a television series.

His work for younger readers earned some of his most significant honours. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, a Discworld novel about a talking cat running a Pied Piper scam, won the Carnegie Medal in 2001, the top British award for children's literature ^[5]. Nation, a non Discworld novel published in 2008, won the Printz Award honor in the United States. Formal recognition followed steadily: an OBE for services to literature in 1998, a knighthood in the 2009 New Year Honours, and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2010 ^[4]. Any account of Terry Pratchett achievements also has to note the string of honorary doctorates from universities including Warwick, Portsmouth, Bristol, Dublin and South Australia.

Pratchett married Lyn Purves in 1968, and the couple settled first in Somerset before moving to Broad Chalke, a village southwest of Salisbury in Wiltshire. Their daughter Rhianna, born in 1976, became a journalist and video game writer, contributing to titles including the rebooted Tomb Raider series ^[3].

Away from the desk Pratchett kept a set of enthusiasms that regularly leaked into his fiction. He was a keen amateur astronomer from childhood, kept an observatory in his garden, and had a long interest in natural history that led him to support orangutan conservation; the Librarian of the Unseen University, an orangutan, became one of his best loved characters, and he travelled to Borneo with a documentary crew to see the apes in the wild ^[2]. He was famous for his black fedora, which became his public trademark, and for greenhouse grown carnivorous plants.

He was also an early adopter of technology. Pratchett wrote on computers from the 1980s onward, was an active presence on Usenet newsgroups where fans dissected his books, and after his diagnosis continued writing by dictation software when typing became difficult ^[1]. Colleagues described a writer of unusual industry, often producing two books a year at his peak.

In December 2007 Pratchett announced publicly that he had been diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare variant of early onset Alzheimer's disease that attacks visual processing before memory ^[6]. He was 59. Characteristically he called the news "an embuggerance" and asked fans to keep things cheerful, adding that he was not dead yet. Three months later he donated one million dollars to the Alzheimer's Research Trust, remarking on the imbalance between dementia research funding and its human cost ^[6].

The diagnosis turned him into a public campaigner. He fronted the BBC documentary Terry Pratchett: Living with Alzheimer's in 2009, and in 2011 presented Choosing to Die, a documentary about assisted dying filmed partly at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, which won a BAFTA and stirred national debate ^[7]. His 2010 Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Shaking Hands with Death, read on his behalf by the actor Tony Robinson, argued for the right of people with terminal illness to choose the time of their death.

Remarkably, the books kept coming. Unseen Academicals (2009), I Shall Wear Midnight (2010), Snuff (2011) and Raising Steam (2013) all appeared after the diagnosis, along with the Long Earth science fiction series written with Stephen Baxter ^[4]. Pratchett died at his home in Broad Chalke on March 12, 2015, aged 66, with his cat sleeping on his bed and his family around him, as his assistant Rob Wilkins announced ^[1]. The final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, was published that August.

Sales alone would secure Pratchett's place: more than 85 million books sold worldwide by the time of his death, by his publisher's estimate ^[4]. But his reputation has grown on other grounds. Critics who once filed him under light entertainment increasingly read the Discworld as moral satire in the tradition of Swift and Dickens, praised for its treatment of belief, power, prejudice and death. The novelist A. S. Byatt was among those who argued publicly for his literary seriousness ^[2].

His influence runs through contemporary fantasy and comedy writing, and his afterlife in adaptation has been busy: stage versions by Stephen Briggs, Sky television films of Hogfather, The Colour of Magic and Going Postal, the Amazon and BBC series of Good Omens, and an animated film of The Amazing Maurice in 2022. In 2017, honouring his stated wish, a vintage steamroller crushed the hard drive containing his unfinished manuscripts at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, ensuring no posthumous completions ^[8]. A biography by Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, appeared in 2022.

Beyond literature, his openness about dementia changed British public conversation about the disease, and donations and awareness campaigns in his name continue. For readers coming fresh to a Terry Pratchett biography, the essential point is the combination: a comic writer of enormous popular reach who used jokes to ask serious questions, and who faced his own death with the same unsentimental clarity he gave to Death the character, a skeleton with a white horse called Binky and a soft spot for humanity ^[1].