Profile of Terry Pratchett on Famous Like Me

Terence David John Pratchett OBE is an English fantasy author (born April 28, 1948, in Beaconsfield, Bucks), best known for his Discworld series. As of March 2005 he has sold approximately 40 million books worldwide.

Biography

Terry Pratchett was born in Beaconsfield to David and Eileen Pratchett, of Hay-on-Wye. He credits his education to High Wycombe Technical High School and Beaconsfield Public Library.

His first published work was the short story "The Hades Business", which appeared in his school magazine when he was 13, and was subsequently reprinted in Science Fantasy magazine in 1963, for which he was paid £14. His second published work was "Night Dweller", which appeared in New Worlds magazine, issue 156 in November 1965.

On leaving school in 1965, he gained employment as a local newspaper journalist on the Bucks Free Press ("I started work one morning and saw my first body three hours later, 'on-the-job training' meaning something in those days"). He subsequently moved on to a number of other regional newspapers in south-west England including the Western Daily Press and Bath Chronicle.

It was during his time as a journalist that he was sent to interview Peter Bander van Duren, a co-director of Colin Smythe Limited, a small publishing company in Gerrards Cross, about a new book the company was publishing and Pratchett happened to mention that he had written a novel of his own, The Carpet People. It was eventually published in 1971, with a launch party held in the carpet department of Heal's department store on Tottenham Court Road, London.

In 1980, he became Press Officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board in an area which covered several nuclear power stations; he later joked that he had demonstrated impeccable timing by making this career change so soon after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania, USA. Pratchett gave up his work for the CEGB in 1987 when he realised he could make a living through writing; this accounts for a significant increase in his output, and since then has managed to publish two novels a year. According to the 2005 Booksellers' Pocket Yearbook, in 2003 Pratchett's UK sales amounted to 3.4% of the fiction market by hardback sales and 3.8% by value, putting him in 2nd place behind J. K. Rowling (6% and 5.6% respectively), while in the paperback sales list Pratchett came 5th with 1.2% by sales and 1.3% by value (behind James Patterson (1.9% and 1.7%), Alexander McCall Smith, John Grisham and J. R. R. Tolkien).

In 1998 Terry Pratchett was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature. Typically, his own tongue-in-cheek comment was "I suspect the 'services to literature' consisted of refraining from trying to write any." He has been awarded honorary Doctorates of Letters, by the University of Warwick in 1999, by the University of Portsmouth in 2001 and by the University of Bristol in 2004.

His daughter Rhianna Pratchett (born 1976) is a fantasy author, journalist and "accidental cat collector".

Pratchett lists his recreations as "writing, walking, computers, life." He is also well known for his penchant for wearing large, black hats, as seen on the inside back covers of most of his books.

In July 31, 2005, Pratchett criticised media coverage of Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, commenting that certain members of the media seemed to think that "the continued elevation of J. K. Rowling can only be achieved at the expense of other writers". His remarks were later taken out of context and interpreted by many as an attack on Rowling herself, rather than the media.

On October 19th 2005, Pratchett was admitted to the Accident and Emergency department of St. James's Hospital, Dublin, after several days of chest pains forced him to leave an earlier book signing in the city.

Discworld

Now containing over 30 books, the Discworld series is a humorous fantasy work that parodies everything under the sun where the disc-shaped world rotates on the backs of four giant elephants supported by the enormous turtle Great A'Tuin swimming its way through space. Major topics of parody have included many science fiction and fantasy characters, ideas and tropes, Ingmar Bergman films, Australia, film making, newspaper publishing, rock and roll music, religion, philosophy (mainly Greek), Egyptian history, trade unions, monarchy, and on and on.

Pratchett's novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents won the 2001 Carnegie Medal for best children's novel (awarded in 2002).

See the Discworld article for a list of Discworld novels.

Related works

Together with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Pratchett has also written The Science of Discworld (1999), The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (2002) and The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch (2005). All of these have chapters that alternate between fiction and non-fiction, with the fictional chapters being mainly set on the Discworld.

Adaptations

Comic books

• The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Mort and Guards! Guards! have all been adapted as graphic novels.

Theatre

Several of Pratchett's novels have been adapted as plays by Stephen Briggs and many of the scripts have been published in book form. These include:

• Wyrd Sisters: The Play (1996)
• Mort: The Play (1996)
• Johnny and the Dead (1996) (non-Discworld)
• Guards! Guards!: The Play (1997)
• Men at Arms: The Play (1997)
• Maskerade (1998)
• Interesting Times (2002)
• The Truth (2002)

Television

• Johnny and the Dead was made into a TV serial for Children's ITV on ITV1 in 1995. It starred Andrew Falvery as Johnny, and featured Brian Blessed as William Stickers and George Baker as Alderman Bowler.

Animation

• Truckers was adapted as a stop-animation series for Thames Television by Cosgrove Hall
• Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music have also been adapted as animated series by Cosgrove Hall Films for Channel 4.

Radio

• Guards! Guards!, Wyrd Sisters and Mort have been dramatised as serials and The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents has been heard as a 90-minute play, all for BBC Radio 4.

Role-playing games

• Discworld MUD, a free, extremely large, online game based on the series.
• GURPS Discworld (Steve Jackson Games, 1998) and GURPS Discworld Also (Steve Jackson Games, 2001) were written by Terry Pratchett and Phil Masters and are not only wonderful role-playing source books, but also offer numerous insights into the workings of the Discworld and the power of narrative. The first of these two books has recently been re-released under the name of The Discworld Roleplaying Game with art by Paul Kidby.

PC and Console games

The Discworld universe has also been used as a basis for a number of Discworld video games on a range of formats, such as the Sega Saturn, the Sony Playstation, the Philips CD-i, and the 3DO Console as well as Windows PCs. As well as others, the most notable are:

• The Colour of Magic, the first game based on the series and so far the only one directly adapted from a Discworld novel. It was released in 1986 for the Sinclair Spectrum.
• Discworld, an animated "point-and-click" style game by Psygnosis Ltd. in 1995.
• Discworld II (Discworld 2), a followup game to the original in the same style by Psygnosis Ltd. in 1996. It was sub-titled "Mortality Bytes" in the US and "Missing, Presumed...!?" in the UK and Europe.
• Discworld Noir is the first 3D game based on Discworld and both an example and parody of the noir genre. The game was created by Perfect Entertainment and released by GT Interactive for both the PC and PlayStation in 1999. It was released only in the UK and Europe.

Other non-Discworld books by Pratchett

• Strata (though this does feature a disc shaped world, the novel is more a parody of Larry Niven's Ringworld) (Colin Smythe, 1981)
• The Dark Side of the Sun (Colin Smythe, 1976)
• The Carpet People (Pratchett's debut novel, re-released in a substantially rewritten edition after he became famous) (Colin Smythe, 1971)
• A trilogy of children's books (known as The Bromeliad):
  • Truckers
  • Diggers
  • Wings
• Good Omens (co-written with Neil Gaiman)
• The Unadulterated Cat (with Gray Jolliffe. A homage to real cats)
• A trilogy of children's books about Johnny Maxwell, who sees dead people, aliens and a variety of other bizarre things:
  • Only You Can Save Mankind
  • Johnny and the Dead
  • Johnny and the Bomb
• Once More* *With Footnotes - a collection of articles, introductions and short stories, published by NESFA.

Other books containing contributions by Pratchett

• The Wizards of Odd edited by Peter Haining (1997) includes a Discworld short story
• The Mammoth Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories edited by Peter Haining (1998) is the "sequel" to The Wizards of Odd and starts off with a Pratchett story featuring Death.
• Meditations on Middle-Earth (2002)
• The Leaky Establishment written by David Langford and recently re-issued for which Pratchett provided a foreword
• The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy edited by Mike Ashley (2001) contains a story featuring Cohen the Barbarian.
• Good Omens was co-written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Works about Pratchett

Pratchett's books have received a level of critical acclaim unusual for their genre. A collection of essays about his writings is compiled in the book, Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature?, eds. Andrew M. Butler, Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, publish by Science Fiction Foundation in 2000.

Two trivia books have been published, both compiled by David Langford. They are named The Unseen University Challenge and The Wyrdest Link.

Fans

First editions of the early Discworld books in good condition are very valuable - the British first hardcover edition of The Colour of Magic is now worth over £2000 (4,500 copies were printed by St Martin's Press in the USA, of which 506 were sold in Britain under the Colin Smythe imprint, hence the scarcity!), while The Light Fantastic is worth £1000-1500.

It is even possible to get a character in one of the future Discworld books named after yourself. Usually people appear in the books by bidding for the privilege in charity auctions. See: Discworld, Discworld characters.

The cover art of all of the Discworld novels sold in the United Kingdom was created by Josh Kirby until his death in 2001.

Internet

Pratchett was one of the first authors to use the Internet to communicate with fans and has been a contributor to the Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.pratchett for over a decade.

Influences

Terry Pratchett makes no secret of outside influences on his work; they are a major source of humour. He imports numerous characters from popular culture, but adds an unexpected aspect. These references are fairly consistent, and there are lists available on Terry Pratchett fansites which detail all the known references.

Orangutans

Pratchett's interest in orangutans is not confined to the Librarian, one of his most popular fictional characters. He has also done work for the Orang-Utan Foundation including visiting Borneo with a Channel 4 film crew to make an episode of "Jungle Quest", seeing orangutans in their natural habitat. Following Pratchett's lead, fan events such as the Discworld Conventions have adopted the Orang-Utan Foundation as their nominated charity. At these conventions, if Pratchett is attending, there is a traditional auction in which fans can bid money to have their name included in the next Discworld book. All proceeds go to the Orangutan Foundation.

Trademarks

Aside from his distinctive writing style, Pratchett is known for the use of footnotes in his books. Usually involving a comic departure from the narrative or commentary on the narrative, these footnotes are more numerous in his earlier work.

Notes

2. ^ The Dutch translation of Good Omens contains an ironic preface by the translator wherein he asserts that no extra footnotes were added to clarify matters that might be unclear to a modern audience —annotated with footnotes explaining omen and Crowley.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Terry Pratchett