Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd (born October 5 1949, London) is an English author.
Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm and his father had left home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers at the age of 5 and wrote a play about Guy Fawkes when he was 9.
Ackroyd won a double first in English at Clare College, Cambridge as an undergraduate and was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University, in the United States.
His career started in poetry, including works such as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, including shortlisting for the Booker Prize in 1987.
Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. He was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and is currently a regular radio broadcaster and book critic.
Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London and one of his most recent works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages. In 2002 he followed this with his most scholarly work yet, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, being a work of intellectual history that traces themes in English culture from the Anglo-Saxon era to the present.
From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series ("Not just sound-bite snacks for short attention spans, but unfolding feasts that leave you with a sense of wonder", The Sunday Times) is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.
Fiction
The Great Fire of London – 1982, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde – 1983, Hawksmoor – 1985,
Chatterton – 1987 (shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 1987), First Light – 1989, English Music – 1992, The House of Doctor Dee – 1993, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem – 1994 (also published as The Trial of Elizabeth Cree), Milton in America – 1996, The Plato Papers – 1999, The Clerkenwell Tales – 2003, The Lambs of London – 2004, The Fall of Troy – 2006.
Adult Non-fiction
Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism – 1976, Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession – 1979, T. S. Eliot: A Life – 1984, Dickens' London: An Imaginative Vision – 1987, The Life of Thomas More – 1988, Ezra Pound and his World – 1989, Dickens – 1990, An Introduction to Dickens – 1991, Blake – 1996, London: The Biography – 2000, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination – 2002, Chaucer (first in planned series of Ackroyd's Brief Lives) – 2005, Shakespeare: The Biography – 2005.
Plays
The Mystery of Charles Dickens – 2000.
Maeve Binchy
Binchy was born in the town of Dalkey, Ireland on May 28; 1940. She was educated, and lives in Ireland, a land well known for its great storytellers. Firmly grounded in the Irish storytelling tradition, Binchy has earned a great popularity for her many novels and collections of short stories. She proved herself to be an immensely talented and successful writer.
Binchy was introduced into the joys of storytelling at an early age. Her mother, Maureen, and father, William, a prominent Dublin barrister, encouraged Binchy and her three siblings to be avid readers as well as to share stories at dinner and, as her brother William admits, nobody loved telling stories more than Maeve. She grew up in the quiet seaside town of Dalkey, about 10 miles south Dublin. She was educated at the University College in Dublin, where she studied history and French.
After graduating in 1960, she taught Latin, French, and history in a Dublin grade school and traveled much during summer vacations. She proved so popular a teacher that parents of her students pooled their money to send her on a trip to Israel. Her father was so impressed by the letters she wrote describing Israeli life that h typed them up and sent them to the Irish Independent newspaper. That's how Maeve returned home to find, quite to her surprise, that she was now a published writer.
She soon got a job on The Irish Times as the women's editor.
In the early 70s, she shifted to feature reporting, and moved to London. Binchy decided to take a chance and move to London to be with the man she'd fallen in love, Gordon Snell, a BBC broadcaster, the author of children's book, and mystery novelist.
Maeve married Gordon in 1977, and in 1980 they bought a one-bedroom cottage back in Binchy's old hometown of Dalkey. By this time she had already published two collections of her newspaper work and one of short stories. She decided to try to sell her first novel, Light A Penny Candle (1982) to the publisher. Maeve and her husband still live in that same Dalkey cottage, where they share an office, writing side by side. "All I ever wanted to do," she says, "is to write stories that people will enjoy and feel at home with." She has unquestionably succeeded with that goal. Light A Penny Candle was followed by such bestselling works as Circle of Friends (1990), the novel about the friendship of two girls from different social classes which was made into a successful movie adaptation, and Tara Road (1998), the story of an Irish woman and an American woman who swap houses for a summer, is an engaging look at a friendship cobbled together from the unexpected intimacy of trading spaces.
Binchy has many New York Times bestsellers to her name and is consistently named one of the most popular writers in readers' polls in England and Ireland.
In addition to her books, Binchy is also a playwright whose works have been staged at The Peacock Theatre of Dublin, and was the author of a hugely popular monthly column called “Maeve's Week”, which appeared in The Irish Time for 32 years. A kind of combined gossip, humour, and advice column, it achieved cult statue in Ireland and abroad.
Scarlet Feather, published in March 2002, was both a critical and a commercial success going oh to earn the number 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list when published in paperback a year later by New American library. It was followed by her new book, Quentins.
Jeffrey Archer
Jeffrey Howard Archer, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare (born 15 April 1940) is a British author and politician. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) and Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, and prior to his conviction and imprisonment for perjury was a candidate in the 2000 election for London Mayor.
Jeffrey Howard Archer was born in the City of London Maternity Hospital. When he was two weeks old he and his family moved to the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, where he spent most of his early life. In 1951 he won a scholarship to Wellington School, in Somerset.
Archer left school after passing three O-levels, in English Literature, Art, and History. He worked in a number of jobs, including training with the army and for the police. He lasted only a few months in either position, but he fared very well as a Physical Education teacher at Dover College. As a person and teacher he was very popular with his pupils and was reported to have had very good motivational skills.
He gained a place at Brasenose College, Oxford to study for a one-year diploma in education, though he eventually stayed there for three years, gaining an academic qualification in teaching awarded by Oxford University.
After leaving Oxford, he began a career in politics, serving as a councillor on the Greater London Council from 1967 onwards.
At the age of 29, he was elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) for the Lincolnshire constituency of Louth (UK Parliament constituency), holding the seat for the Conservative Party in a by-election on 4 December 1969.
Archer remained as Honorary President of the Immingham Conservative Party until he withdrew from the 2000 election for Mayor of London in 1999.
In Parliament, Archer was on the left of the Conservative Party, rebelling against some of his party's policies. He urged free TV licences for the elderly and was against museum charges. Archer voted against restoring the death penalty saying it was barbaric and obscene.
His first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less was a success, and he ultimately avoided bankruptcy, never being legally declared bankrupt. Kane and Abel proved to be his best-selling work, reaching number one on the New York Times bestsellers list. It was made into a television mini-series. Archer purchased the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, a house associated with the poet Rupert Brooke.
Archer's political career revived once he became well known for his writing. He was made Deputy Chairman of the Conservative party by Margaret Thatcher in 1985.
Archer was created a life peer as Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare, of Mark in the County of Somerset in 1992 by John Major, having become a confidante of the then Prime Minister
Libel case
In 1987 Archer sued the Daily Star for libel when they alleged that he had had sex with a prostitute named Monica Coghlan in September 1986. He won the case and was awarded £500,000 damages, but not everyone was convinced by the verdict. Journalist Adam Raphael wrote an article at the time that carefully avoided libel but implied a number of things: that Archer probably had gone with a prostitute; that at the trial Archer and his lawyers had shifted attention from this issue to the tactics used by the Daily Star to trap Archer; and that the Daily Star had only themselves to blame for this.
The real life trial began on 30 May 2001. On 19 July 2001 Lord Archer was found guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice at the 1987 trial. He was sentenced to a total of four years' imprisonment by Mr. Justice Potts. The most ironic aspect of his trial was that he had fabricated the alibi for the wrong date. Archer never spoke during the trial.
Archer originally was sent to Belmarsh Prison, but was moved to the category "C" Wayland Prison in Norfolk on 9 August 2001, and to HMP North Sea Camp, an open prison in October 2001. From there he was let out to work at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln, England, and was allowed occasional home visits. Reports in the media, which showed a continuing interest in him, claimed that he had been abusing this privilege by attending lunches with friends, and in September 2002 he was transferred to Lincoln Prison for a month.
In October 2002 Archer repaid the Daily Star the £500,000 damages he had received in 1987, as well as legal costs of £1 million (under the British legal system, losing claimants must re-pay the defendant's legal costs). That month, he was suspended from Marylebone Cricket Club for seven years for his behaviour.
On 21 July 2003 he was released on licence, after serving half of his sentence, from HMP Hollesley Bay, Suffolk. In September 2003, the government announced reforms that would prevent convicted criminals from serving in the House of Lords; supporters argued that other peers sent to prison, such as Lord Kagan, were not stripped of their titles. Those reforms have yet to be implemented.
On 26 February 2006 on Andrew Marr's Sunday AM programme, Archer said he had no interest in returning to politics: he would pursue his writing career instead.
Themes found in his work
Archer seems to be a big fan of interweaving characters; Kane and Abel is the obvious example, where two men, born on different sides of the world in completely opposite surroundings eventually meet in stories which span a lifetime; similar situations occur in Sons of Fortune, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, and The Fourth Estate. He uses this device with heroes and villains, too, as found in As the Crow Flies and First Among Equals.
Archer very often takes his characters from the upper classes of the UK or New England, discussing mannerisms and sensitivities from that layer of society. The majority of his works are set in the U.S., though his characters tend to use British grammar.
His "non-epic" works (A Matter of Honour, a chase story, and Shall We Tell the President?, a detective thriller) usually are set within a much shorter time frame and have fewer characters.
Art also is a theme in his works. Several novels and short stories have had a focus around works of art. A Matter of Honour focused around a work of art, plus the secret it held. First Among Equals also featured a work of art as a plot device. Sons of Fortune had one main character collecting "Painted Mistresses", and As the Crow Flies featured an art expert and a collector of art as main characters. In Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less the victim of the con game buys a fake Van Gogh picture as one of the schemes to get even with the man the protagonists were defrauded by. A Van Gogh painting is at the centre of False Impression while the short story "Not for Sale" is centred around a talented young artist having her first exhibition. Additionally, the short story "Chalk and Cheese" centred on the differing lives of two brothers, one of whom was an artist, and the other of whom was an art collector. Archer's love of art was revealed in his Prison Diaries, where he talked about how he tried to buy a Botero from another inmate.
The other prevailing theme among Archer's works is his twist endings. It happens in his thrillers, his novels, and his short stories. For example, in his short story "Just Good Friends" the first-person narrative describes somebody who went home with some guy she met in a pub and stayed with him ever since. Her own life was that of abandonment by her mother (who only left her a fur coat), impregnation by somebody who never saw her again, her children taken away by the authorities, and never telling anything to the guy she is living with. She also doesn't respond to the alarm clock, letting the guy get up and fix food for them. Only in the end do we realize the narrator is a female cat. Several years before the publication of this story, Archer judged a short story competition which was won by Kathleen Burnett with a story which shares many features with "Just Good Friends". Archer said it was a "genuinely original idea." When Burnett complained to the publishers, they said there was no copyright in an idea.
Bibliography
1975 - In the Lap of the Gods, 1976 - Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, 1977 - Shall We Tell the President?, 1979 - Kane and Abel, 1980 - Willy visits the Square World, 1980 - A Quiver Full of Arrows, 1982 - The Prodigal Daughter, 1984 - First Among Equals, 1986 - A Matter of Honour, 1988 - A Twist in the Tale (Short story collection), 1991 - As the Crow Flies, 1993 - Honour Among Thieves, 1994 - Twelve Red Herrings, 1996 - The Fourth Estate, 1998 - The Eleventh Commandment, 2000 - To Cut A Long Story Short, 2002 - Sons of Fortune, 2002 – 2004 - A Prison Diary, 2006 - False Impression, 2006 - Cat O'Nine Tales
Anita Brookner
Anita Brookner (born July 16, 1928) is an English novelist and art historian born in London. Educated at James Allen's Girls' School then King's College London, in 1967 she became the first woman to hold the Slade professorship at Cambridge University. Since 1977, she has been associated with the Courtauld Institute of Art. However, since winning the Booker Prize in 1984 for Hotel du Lac, she has become better known as a novelist.
Her fiction is mostly set in London, where she has lived all her life apart from 3 years in Paris as a postgraduate, and often involves characters of Jewish extraction, like herself. Her works explore the alienation of a character, usually female, whose quiet, solitary lives are punctuated by destitution and disappointments in love. Her style has often borne her comparisons with Jane Austen and Henry James.
Bibliography:
A Start in Life (1981), Providence (1982), Look at Me (1983), Hotel du Lac (1984) (Won the Booker Prize), Family and Friends (1985), A Misalliance (1986), A Friend from England (1987), Latecomers (1988), Lewis Percy (1989), Brief Lives (1990), A Closed Eye (1991), Fraud (1992), A Family Romance (1993), Dolly (1993), A Private View (1994), Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995), Altered States (1996), Visitors (1997), Falling Slowly (1998), Undue Influence (1999), The Bay of Angels (2001), The Next Big Thing (2002) Long Listed for the Booker Prize, The Rules of Engagement (2003), Leaving Home (2005).
The canon of contemporary British fantasy: bestselling works by Joanne Rowling and Terry Pratchett.
Joanne Rowling
Joanne Rowling (born July 31, 1965) is an English fiction writer who writes under the pen name J. K. Rowling. Rowling is the author of the Harry Potter fantasy series, which has gained international attention, won multiple awards, and sold over 375 million copies worldwide. In February 2004, Forbes magazine estimated her fortune at £576 million (just over US$1 billion), making her the first person to become a US-dollar billionaire by writing books. Rowling earned US$75 million in 2005. In 2006, Forbes named her the second richest female entertainer in the world, behind talk show host Oprah Winfrey.
Joanne Rowling was born at Yate, northeast of Bristol, South Gloucestershire, England on 31 July 1965. Her sister Dianne (Di) was born at their home when Rowling was 23 months old. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four where she attended St Michael's Primary School, later moving to Tutshill, near Chepstow, South Wales at the age of nine. She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College. Rowling was good with languages, but did not excel at sports and mathematics. There are numerous Welsh references to places, things and people in Harry Potter, which could be attributed to her time in Chepstow.
In December 1990, Rowling’s mother succumbed to a 10-year-long battle with multiple sclerosis. Rowling commented, “I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter.”
After studying French and Classics at the University of Exeter (she had previously applied to Oxford but was turned down), with a year of study in Paris, she moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. During this period, while she was on a four-hour delayed-train trip between Manchester and London, she had the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry. When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began writing immediately.
Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there, she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes on 16 October 1992. They had one child, Jessica, who was named after Rowling’s heroine, Jessica Mitford. They divorced in 1993 after a fight in which Jorge threw her out of the house.
In December 1994, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near Rowling’s sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. Unemployed and living on state benefits, she completed her first novel. She did much of the work in the Elephant House café whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. There was a rumour that she wrote in local cafés to escape from her unheated flat, but in a 2001 BBC interview Rowling remarked, “I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated flat in Edinburgh in midwinter. It had heating.”
Harry Potter books
In 1995, Rowling finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on an old manual typewriter. Upon the enthusiastic response of Bryony Evans, a reader who had been asked to review the book’s first three chapters, the Fulham-based Christopher Little Literary Agents agreed to represent Rowling in her quest for a publisher. The book was submitted to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. A year later she was finally given the green light (and a £1500 advance) by editor Barry Cunningham from Bloomsbury, a small British publishing house in London, England. The decision to publish Rowling's book apparently owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury’s chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next. Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, Cunningham says that he advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of making money in children’s books. Soon after, in 1997, Rowling received an £8000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing. The following spring, an auction was held in the United States for the rights to publish the novel, and was won by Scholastic Inc., for $105,000. Rowling has said she “nearly died” when she heard the news.
In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher’s Stone with an initial print-run of 1000 copies, five hundred of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are valued between £16,000 and £25,000. Five months later, the book won its first award, a Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. In February, the novel won the prestigious British Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year, and later, the Children’s Book Award. Its sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was published in July, 1998.[42] In October 1998, Scholastic published Philosopher’s Stone in the US under the title of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: a change Rowling claims she now regrets and would have fought if she had been in a better position at the time.
In December 1999, the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year award, though it lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.
The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released simultaneously in the UK and the US on 8 July 2000, and broke sales records in both countries. Some 372,775 copies of the book were sold in its first day in the UK, almost equalling the number Prisoner of Azkaban sold during its first year. In the US, the book sold three million copies in its first 48 hours, smashing all literary sales records. Rowling admitted that she had had a moment of crisis while writing the novel; "Halfway through writing Four, I realised there was a serious fault with the plot ... I've had some of my blackest moments with this book ... One chapter I rewrote 13 times, though no-one who has read it can spot which one or know the pain it caused me." Rowling was named author of the year in the 2000 British Book Awards.
A wait of three years occurred between the release of Goblet of Fire and the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This gap led to press speculation that Rowling had developed writer's block, speculations she fervently denied. Rowling later admitted that writing the book was a chore. "I think Phoenix could have been shorter", she told Lev Grossman, "I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end."
The sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was released on 16 July 2005. It too broke all sales records, selling nine million copies in its first 24 hours of release. While writing, she told a fan online, "Book six has been planned for years, but before I started writing seriously I spend two months re-visiting the plan and making absolutely sure I knew what I was doing." She noted on her website that the opening chapter of book six, which features a conversation between the Minister of Magic and the British Prime Minister, had been intended as the first chapter first for Philosopher's Stone, then Chamber of Secrets then Prisoner of Azkaban. In 2006, Half-Blood Prince received the Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards.
The title of the seventh and final Harry Potter book was revealed 21 December 2006 to be Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In February 2007 it was reported that Rowling wrote on a bust in her hotel room at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh that she had finished the seventh book in that room on 11 January 2007. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released on 21 July 2007 (0:00 BST) and broke its predecessor's record as the fastest-selling book of all time. It sold 11 million copies in the first day of release in the United Kingdom and United States. She has said that the last chapter of the book was written "in something like 1990", as part of her earliest work on the entire series. During a year period when Rowling was completing the last book, she allowed herself to be filmed for a documentary which aired in Britain on ITV on 30 December 2007. It was entitled J K Rowling... A Year In The Life and showed her returning to her old Edinburgh tenement flat where she lived, and completed the first Harry Potter book. Re-visiting the flat for the first time reduced her to tears, saying it was "really where I turned my life around completely."
Harry Potter is now a global brand worth an estimated £7 billion ($15 billion), and the last four Harry Potter books have consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history. The series, totalling 4,195 pages, has been translated, in whole or in part, into 65 languages.
The Harry Potter books have also gained recognition for sparking an interest in reading among the young at a time when children were thought to be abandoning books for computers and television, although the series' overall impact on children's reading habits has been questioned.
In June 2006, the British public named Rowling “the greatest living British writer” in a poll by The Book Magazine. Rowling topped the poll, receiving nearly three times as many votes as the second-place author, fantasy writer Terry Pratchett. In July 2006 Rowling received a Doctor of Laws (LLD) honorary degree from University of Aberdeen for her "significant contribution to many charitable causes" and "her many contributions to society".[
In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious 19th century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Merchiston, Edinburgh, and a Georgian house in London, on a street where, according to The Guardian, the average price of a house is £4.27 million ($8 million), possibly including an underground swimming pool and 24-hour security.
On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Neil Murray, an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her home in Aberfeldy. Their son David Gordon Rowling Murray was born on March 3, 2003. Shortly after Rowling began writing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, she took a break from working on the novel to care for him in his early infancy. Rowling's youngest child, Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray, to whom she dedicated Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was born in January of 2005.
In June 2000, the Queen honoured Rowling by making her an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In early 2006, the asteroid (43844) Rowling was named in her honour. In May 2006, the newly-discovered Pachycephalosaurid dinosaur Dracorex hogwartsia, currently at the Children's Museum in Indianapolis, was named in honour of her world.
There is a housing development in Bristol, near to her childhood home, called Rowling Gate. Bibliography
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (June 26, 1997) (titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the United States), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (July 2, 1998), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (September 8, 1999), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (July 8, 2000), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2001), Quidditch Through the Ages (2001), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (June 21, 2003), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (July 16, 2005), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (July 21, 2007).
Terry Pratchett
Terence David John Pratchett (born 28 April 1948) is an English fantasy author, best known for his Discworld series. As of February 2007 he had sold approximately 50 million books worldwide.
Terry Pratchett was born in 1948 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.
Working as a journalist, Pratchett interviewed Peter Bander van Duren, co-director of a small publishing company. During the meeting, Pratchett mentioned he had written a manuscript, The Carpet People. Bander van Duren and his business partner, Colin Smythe, published the book in 1971.
In 1980, he became Press Officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board in an area which covered four 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, and that 'he would write a book about his experiences, if he thought anyone would believe them..'
Pratchett gave up his work for the CEGB in 1987 to make his living through writing 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 Literature, by the University of Warwick in 1999, the University of Portsmouth in 2001, the University of Bath in 2003 and the University of Bristol in 2004.
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 2003 Pratchett firmly re-inforced his credentials as one of Britains most loved authors by joining Charles Dickens as the only author with five books in the BBC's Big Read top 100 (four of which were Discworld novels) and was the author with the most novels in the top 200 (fifteen).
Terry Pratchett is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.
When he took up his position with the Western Daily Press in 1970 he moved, with wife Lyn (whom he had married in 1968), to a cottage in Rowberrow in Somerset where their daughter Rhianna was born. When he found he could not enlarge the cottage further, the family moved in 1993 to what he has described as 'a Domesday manorette' south west of Salisbury, and alert fans will have seen pictures of this on the TV interview at the time Soul Music was published.
Discworld
Now containing over forty books, the Discworld series is a humorous and often satirical fantasy work that uses the Discworld as an allegory for our every day life. The name "Discworld" comes from the fact that the world is described as being shaped like a large disk resting 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, Egyptian history, trade unions, university politics, and monarchy. Pratchett's novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents won the 2001 Carnegie Medal for best children's novel (awarded in 2002).