Terry Pratchett Popular Books

Terry Pratchett Biography & Facts

Sir Terence David John Pratchett (28 April 1948 – 12 March 2015) was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for his 41 comic fantasy novels set on the Discworld, and for the apocalyptic comedy novel Good Omens (1990) which he wrote with Neil Gaiman. Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971. The first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983, after which Pratchett wrote an average of two books a year. The final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, was published in August 2015, five months after his death. With more than 100 million books sold worldwide in 43 languages, Pratchett was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998 and was knighted for services to literature in the 2009 New Year Honours. In 2001, he won the annual Carnegie Medal for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, the first Discworld book marketed for children. He received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2010. In December 2007, Pratchett announced that he had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. He later made a substantial public donation to the Alzheimer's Research Trust (now Alzheimer's Research UK, ARUK), filmed a television programme chronicling his experiences with the condition for the BBC, and became a patron for ARUK. Pratchett died in March 2015, aged 66. Early life and education Pratchett was born on 28 April 1948 in Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, England, the only child of David (1921–2006), a mechanic, and Eileen Pratchett (1922–2010), a secretary, of Hay-on-Wye. His maternal grandparents came from Ireland. Pratchett attended Holtspur School, where he was bullied for his speech impediments. He was bothered by the head teacher, who, he said, thought "he could tell how successful you were going to be in later life by how well you could read or write at the age of six". Pratchett's family moved to Bridgwater, Somerset, briefly in 1957. He passed his eleven plus exam in 1958, earning a place at High Wycombe Technical High School, where he was a key member of the debating society and wrote stories for the school magazine. Pratchett described himself as a "non-descript" student and, in his Who's Who entry, credited his education to the Beaconsfield Public Library. Pratchett's early interests included astronomy. He collected Brooke Bond tea cards about space, owned a telescope and wanted to be an astronomer, but lacked the necessary mathematical skills. He developed an interest in science fiction and attended science fiction conventions from about 1963–1964, but stopped a few years later when he got his first job as a trainee journalist at the local paper. His early reading included the works of H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and "every book you really ought to read", which he later regarded as "getting an education". Pratchett published his first short story, "Business Rivals", in the High Wycombe Technical School magazine in 1962. It is the tale of a man named Crucible who finds the Devil in his flat in a cloud of sulphurous smoke. "The Hades Business" was published in the school magazine when he was 13, and published commercially when he was 15. Pratchett earned five O-levels and started A-level courses in Art, English and History. His initial career choice was journalism and he left school at 17, in 1965, to start an apprenticeship with Arthur Church, the editor of the Bucks Free Press. In this position he wrote, among other things, over 80 stories for the Children's Circle section under the name Uncle Jim. Two of the stories contain characters found in his novel The Carpet People (1971). While on day release from his apprenticeship, Pratchett finished his A-Level in English and took the National Council for the Training of Journalists proficiency course. Career In 1968, Pratchett interviewed Peter Bander van Duren, co-director of a small publishing company, Colin Smythe Ltd. Pratchett mentioned he had written a manuscript, The Carpet People. Colin Smythe Ltd published the book in 1971, with illustrations by Pratchett. It received strong, although few, reviews and was followed by the science fiction novels The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981). In the 1970s and 1980s, Pratchett published stories in a regional newspaper under the pseudonym Patrick Kearns. After various positions in journalism, in 1979 Pratchett became Press Officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) in an area that covered three 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, US, and said he would "write a book about his experiences if he thought anyone would actually believe them". The first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in hardback by Colin Smythe Ltd in 1983. Pratchett gave up working for the CEGB to make his living through writing in 1987, after finishing the fourth Discworld novel, Mort. His sales increased quickly and many of his books occupied top places on the best-seller list; he was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s. According to The Times, Pratchett was the top-selling and highest earning UK author in 1996. Some of his books have been published by Doubleday, another Transworld imprint. In the US, where he is published by HarperCollins, Pratchett had poorer sales, marketing and distribution until the 2000s, when Thud! reached the New York Times bestseller list in 2005. According to the Bookseller's Pocket Yearbook (2005), 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 second place behind J. K. Rowling (6% and 5.6%, respectively), while in the paperback sales list Pratchett came 5th with 1.2% and 1.3% by value (behind James Patterson (1.9% and 1.7%), Alexander McCall Smith, John Grisham, and J. R. R. Tolkien). He has UK sales of more than 2.5 million copies a year. His 2011 Discworld novel Snuff became the third-fastest-selling hardback adult-readership novel since records began in the UK, selling 55,000 copies in the first three days. As of 2023, Pratchett's works have sold more than 100 million copies in 43 languages. Personal life Pratchett married Lyn Purves at the Congregational Church, Gerrards Cross, on 5 October 1968. They moved to Rowberrow, Somerset, in 1970. Their daughter Rhianna Pratchett, also a writer, was born there in 1976. In 1993, the family moved to Broad Chalke, a village west of Salisbury, Wiltshire. Pratchett was the patron of the Friends of High Wycombe Library. In 2013, he gave a talk at Beaconsfield Library, which he had visited as a child, and donated the income from the event to it. He also visited his former school to speak to the students. Pratchett often wore large, black hats, a style described as "more that of urban cowboy than city gent". .... Discover the Terry Pratchett popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Terry Pratchett books.