Terry Pratchett Biography

Terry Pratchett, creator of the Discworld and various children’s books, was born on April 28 1948 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England, a small town about twenty-five miles from London. The town is also well-known for Green Hedges, the house where Enid Blyton spent most of her life. His parents, David and Eileen Pratchett, were originally from Hay-on-Wye, a small market town in the Black Mountains of the Welsh Marches famous for its disproportionate amount of bookshops (over 40 for only 1300 people) and the Hay Festival, which attracts 80,000 people for ten days a year around the end of May.

Terry Pratchett’s first proper job was as a journalist in 1965 where, as it says inside Discworld book covers, he saw his first corpse three hours after beginning work. After doing the rounds in the local journalism racket Terry Pratchett moved onto the Central Electricity Generating Board where he became four nuclear power stations’ press officer. In 1987 Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels were doing well enough for him to quit the day-to-day life of honest employment and write books for a living instead.

Terry now lives with his wife Lyn and daughter Rhianna (born 1976) in Somerset in a lovely house with picturesque garden that contains a dome, constructed by a boat-builder friend of his, that houses a high-powered astronomical telescope. Terry Pratchett enjoys a long-standing love of astronomy and has been fascinated with outer space since childhood, which accounts in part for many of the cosmic themes seen in his Discworld novels and science fiction stories. Rhianna Pratchett is now a journalis and "accidental cat collector". She has written a novella of her own entitled “Child of Chaos”, a fanatsy story that is shipped with a computer role-playing game called "Beyond Divinity".

Terry Pratchett didn’t really get into books and writing until he was around ten years old, having his first story, "The Hades Business", published in his school magazine when he was 13, and reprinted in Science Fantasy magazine in 1963 a couple of years later, he was paid £14 for this. His second published work was "Night Dweller", which appeared in New Worlds magazine, issue 156 in November 1965. It was this early success that encouraged Terry Pratchett to finish school and try journalism, having one day a week off to take A level English, which he passed while working for the Bucks Free Press. He then moved onto various local papers in the south west of England such as the Western Daily Press and Bath Chronicle before moving to his job as Nuclear Press Officer.

It happened by chance, when he was still a journalist, that Terry was sent to interview a co-director of Colin-Smythe Limited (a small publishing firm in Gerrards Cross), Peter Bander van Duren, and was conducting the interview when he happened to mention that he’d just finished a book of his own, “The Carpet People”, which became published for the first time in 1971 with a launch party held at the carpet department of Heal's department store on Tottenham Court Road, London. Terry Pratchett rewrote “The Carpet People” in 1992 with a note reading: "This book had two authors, and they were both the same person."

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels may seem like pure fantasy and magic to the casual, untrained eye, being set on a huge spinning disc that rides on the backs of four elephants that ride on the back of a giant space turtle, but they are in actual fact extremely complicated tales with highly inventive plots that parody our own lives here on Earth. Terry Pratchett was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for his contribution to literature in 1998. He was also 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.

Every new Discworld novel that Terry Pratchett writes sells in excess of 400,000 copies in paperback and 100,000 hardback in the UK alone. The Discworld novels have been translated into 21 languages and as of March 2005 he has sold approximately 40 million books worldwide. Terry Pratchett lists his interests as: "writing, walking, computers, life." And is well known for wearing large, black hats.

text by Maljonic