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Updated January 2008
Terence David John Pratchett: born 28 April 1948 Beaconsfield, Bucks. Major source of education: Beaconsfield Public Library (though school must have been of some little help). After passing his 11-plus in 1959, he attended High Wycombe Technical High School rather than the local grammar because he felt ‘woodwork would be more fun than Latin’. At this time he had no real vision of what he wanted to do with his life, and remembers himself as a ‘nondescript student’.
With his short story The Hades Business published in the school magazine when he was thirteen, and commercially when he was fifteen, Terry was obviously in line for a bright future. Having got five O-levels and started A-level courses in Art, History and English, he decided after the first year to try journalism, and when a job opportunity came up on the Bucks Free Press, he talked things over with his parents, and left school in 1965. While with the Press he still read avidly, took the two-year National Council for the Training of Journalists proficiency course (and came top in the country in its exams) and passed an A level in English, both while on day release. He had interviewed my co-director Peter Bander van Duren about a book he had edited on education in the coming decade, Looking forward to the Seventies, and mentioned to him that he had written a book called The Carpet People and would we consider it for publication? So Peter passed it to me. Yes. It was a delight, and it was obvious that here was an author we had to publish. After some delays (not unusual for a small publisher) we got Terry to produce some illustrations and published it in 1971, with a launch party in the carpet department of Heal’s store in Tottenham Court Road, Londo
We both wrote a blurb and as each wouldn’t give way as to which was to be used,
used both. The Carpet People received few reviews, but those few were ecstatic, with it being described as being ‘of quite extraordinary quality’ (Teacher’s World) and ‘a new dimension in imagination ... the prose is beautiful’ (The Irish Times). What the reviews would have been like had reviewers seen the illustrations in colour - Terry coloured the illustrations in a handful of copies - can only be guessed.
The Carpet People was followed by The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981), both written on dark winter evenings when Terry had nothing better to do. He left the Bucks Free Press and started work for the Western Daily Press on 28 September 1970, but he returned to the Press in 1972 as a sub-editor, and on 3 September 1973 joined the Bath Evening Chronicle. (At this time he also produced a series of cartoons for our monthly journal Psychic Researcher describing the goings-on at the government’s fictional paranormal research establishment, ‘Warlock Hall’.) In 1980 Terry was appointed publicity officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board (now PowerGen) with responsibility for three nuclear power stations (‘What leak? -- Oh, that leak’), where he was working when we published the first of the Discworld novels, The Colour of Magic, in 1983. Terry’s paperback publisher at the time was New English Library, who had published The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata (both with Tim White covers) but they failed to market Strata adequately - the fact they’d just been taken over by by Hodder & Stoughton at the time did not help matters as Hodder’s reps had heard of few of the NEL authors they were now selling, with the possible exception of Heinlein. (NEL published Strata in 1982, but when they sold off their remaining stock in 1985, I bought 300 copies and so kept the book in print for a few more years.)
In 1983, I was able to interest Diane Pearson at Corgi in The Colour of Magic, and then got NEL to forego their option to publish his next book (this one) - 'As Strata sold so badly, you don't want to publish Terry's next book, do you?' 'No, we don't.' 'Oh dear. Well never mind. I expect I'll be able to find another paperback publisher in due course,' sort of exchange - and Diane in turn convinced Corgi to take it. Corgi succeeded in getting BBC ‘Woman’s Hour’ to broadcast it as a six-part serial, immediately after which NEL rang to ask whether the paperback rights were still free: of course, they were too late. Corgi’s publication of the first Discworld novel was the turning point in Terry’s writing career, and the BBC later broadcast his third novel, Equal Rites, also on ‘Woman’s Hour’. At the time, I was told that no other books had generated so much reaction from their listeners.
The Light Fantastic was published in 1986, by which time it had become obvious to Terry and myself that if he was to maximise his potential, then he had to move to a major publishing house, as my company was unable to cope with bestsellers, and that this should be done while we were friends. Victor Gollancz’s SF list was very well known and respected, and Terry indicated that he’d like to be published by that company. I suggested to a friend of mine at Gollancz, David Burnett, that they should consider taking Terry on, and although they had never published fantasy before, only traditional SF, we initially struck a co-publishing deal for three titles, Equal Rites, Mort and Sourcery, and these appeared under Gollancz’s imprint ‘in association with Colin Smythe’. With Terry’s increased popularity, however, it became obvious that this arrangement would cause a conflict of loyalties for me, so it was terminated and I became his agent.
Until the appearance of The Last Continent, all Discworld novels were published in hardcover by Gollancz, while Corgi published all the paperback editions (except Eric). In September 1987, soon after he had finished writing Mort, Terry decided that he could afford to devote himself to full-time writing, rather than merely doing so in his spare time after work: he thought he might suffer a drop in income for a while but that it would pick up in due course – and anyway, he enjoyed it more than fielding questions from the Press about malfunctioning nuclear reactors, so he resigned his position with the CEGB (about which he says he could write a book if he thought anyone would believe him). His sales – and income – picked up very much more quickly than he expected, and his next Gollancz contract was for six books, with much larger advances. Since then, sales have continued to improve, and in 1996 both Maskerade and Interesting Times were in the top ten hardcover and paperback lists of titles most in demand prior to Christmas, while Soul Music (published by Corgi in May 1995) spent an unbroken run of four weeks in the no.1 position on the paperback bestseller list. In 1997 I read that Reaper Man was the eighth fastest-selling novel in Britain in the past five years: a remarkable achievement for any book at that time, let alone a so-called ‘genre’ novel. (Of course, the Harry Potter phenomenon has changed that market out of all recognition, and we should now be surprised at nothing.)
The third Johnny Maxwell novel, Johnny and the Bomb, was published in 1996 as were playtexts by Stephen Briggs, of Mort, Wyrd Sisters, and Johnny and the Dead (this by Oxford University Press), and Gollancz’s publication of Feet of Clay, described by them as a ‘chilling tale of poisoning and pottery’, featuring, among others, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, Captain Carrot and the City Watch. The Pratchett Portfolio of Paul Kidby’s illustrations of Discworld denizens, with accompanying text by Terry, was published in September and November saw the publication of Hogfather, the paperback edition of Maskerade, and the release by Psygnosis of Perfect Entertainment’s game, Discworld II: Missing, Presumed.... As to sales, Hogfather and Maskerade shared the honours by being top of the hardcover and paperback lists respectively two weeks running. It was the third time Terry had had books in the no.1 positions in both lists simultaneously, and as far as I know, no other author has succeeded in doing this even once... And Hogfather held the no.1 position in the hardcover fiction list for five weeks. The Times stated that by their calculations, he was probably the highest earning author of 1996 in Britain, and certainly had the greatest sales.
1997 saw the publication of Jingo, in which Ankh-Morpork and Klatch go to war over an island in the Circle Sea that tends to rise and sink, and the Patrician and the City Watch have to settle matters, the publication of Discworld’s Unseen University Diary for 1998, and the transmission of Cosgrove Hall’s cartoon series Wyrd Sisters, with Astrion releasing it and Soul Music (which has yet to be shown on British TV) on video. Corgi have published the illustrated film-scripts of both. Stephen Briggs’ adaptations of Guards! Guards!, and Men at Arms were also published that year.
Terry’s books do not need listing here, but the twenty-second (and first hardcover to be published by Transworld’s Doubleday imprint) - The Last Continent (definitely not about Australia, but just vaguely Australian) - was published at the beginning of May 1998 and was twelve weeks in the no.1 position in the hardcover fiction best-seller list in Britain. The next, Carpe Jugulum, in which the witches battle vampires for the Kingdom of Lancre, was published on 5 November and it and the paperback edition of Jingo (published on the same day) jointly held the no.1 positions in the hardcover and paperback fiction lists for four weeks running.
Also in May 1998, Corgi published The Tourist’s Guide to Lancre by Terry, Stephen Briggs and Paul Kidby, and Terry’s and Paul’s Death’s Domain, was published in May 1999. The third computer game, called Discworld Noir, was also released about that time, as were a double volume (published by us) containing The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, entitled The First Discworld Novels and the paperback edition of The Last Continent, which stayed for something like twelve weeks in the no.1 position on the paperback bestseller fiction list. In August Steve Jackson Games issued the GURPS Discworld game with contributions by Terry and illustrated by Paul Kidby.
Of his books for young readers, Truckers, the first volume of what is known in the USA as the Bromeliad Trilogy, was a landmark in that it was the first children’s book to appear in the British adult paperback fiction best-seller lists, and in due course it was followed by Diggers, Wings, the revised version of The Carpet People, and all three Johnny Maxwell books, Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny and the Dead, and Johnny and the Bomb.
As far as Britain is concerned Terry was the 1990s’ best-selling living fiction author, with over twelve million sales (but this was before the Potter phenomenon), which are now running at well over two million books a year. During the four years’ existence of the British BookTrack’s weekly bestselling chart, over 60 titles had constantly been in the top 5,000 bestselling titles, and the author with the most titles in this listing is Terry with twelve, namely The Colour of Magic, Guards! Guards!, Pyramids, Soul Music, The Light Fantastic, Reaper Man, Interesting Times, Sourcery, Men at Arms, Equal Rites, Mort and Wyrd Sisters.
Terry has also written a number of short stories, three of which have Discworld themes. The most recent, ‘The Sea and Little Fishes’ was published in October 1998 (in a collection edited by Robert Silverberg, entitled Legends). He finds that they involve him in almost as much work as a full-scale book, and if he is already writing a novel - which is almost all the time - he finds it very difficult to stop and change tracks, as it were, and write a short piece, so there are fewer of that genre around than one might expect. A non-Discworld story, ‘Once and Future’, appeared in a collection in the USA in 1995, but it has not been and will not be published in Britain in the foreseeable future. Plans are afoot for a collection of short stories to be published to coincide with the 2004 Worldcon, when Terry will be its Guest of Honor.
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. Just before they moved, Terry slipped outside the front door of the cottage, hit his head, and mildly concussed himself, blotting out his memory of the previous few hours. Unfortunately, he had received a cheque from me that morning for a rather large sum of money. He knows he put it somewhere safe, but still has no recollection where, and it has yet to turn up. Needless to say, it was stopped and a replacement issued.
Terry’s work for the Orang-Utan Foundation is common knowledge. He went out to Borneo with a film crew to see orangutans in their native habitat, and among the praise that ‘Terry Pratchett’s Jungle Quest’ received was a comment by Sir Alec Guinness in his diary (published the following year), that it was – apart from one other programme – ‘the most impressive thing I’ve seen on the box this year’). Terry has also done a year’s stint as Chairman of the Society of Authors, and was chairman of the panel of judges for the 1997 Rhone-Poulenc Prize.
His fiftieth birthday at the end of April 1998 was celebrated by a party hosted by Transworld. While news of a celebration could not be kept from him, I think that its size –fifty guests to a dinner at the Ivy Restaurant in Soho, with various original presents – took him completely by surprise. But what hit the headlines was his appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s 1998 Birthday Honours List ‘for services to literature’. The initial soundings-out from Downing Street came as such a surprise to him that initially he thought it must be an elaborate hoax. However, accompanied by his family, he went to Buckingham Palace on 26 November 1998 to receive the decoration from the Prince of Wales.
In July 1999 he received an honorary Doctorate of Literature (D.Litt.) from the University of Warwick (and in turn granted doctorates of the Unseen University to Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, co-authors with him of The Science of Discworld, which had been published the previous month), and in 2001 one from the University of Portsmouth. On 10 December 2003 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath, and on 16 July 2004 a fourth, from Bristol University.
The Fifth Elephant (the working title of which had been Uberwald Nights) was published in November 1999, as was Nanny Ogg’s Cook Book (written in collaboration with Stephen Briggs, with recipes by Tina Hannan, and illustrated by Paul Kidby), and the paperback edition was published in November 2001.
Terry’s twenty-fifth Discworld novel, The Truth, was published in November 2000. This novel had been started some years ago but he put it aside as for some time he could not see how the plot would develop. An idea of how long ago he started it is given by the original working title – Interesting Times – but Terry’s not one to let a good idea go to waste... It’s about Ankh-Morpork’s first newspaper, so he has been able to make use of some his experiences from his own reporting days.
It was the first Discworld novel to have simultaneous publication in Britain and America, and it was followed in May 2001 by Thief of Time, featuring Susan, History Monks, the Auditors, the Five Horsemen (including the one who left before they became famous) and even chocolate-covered coffee beans... In August 2001 Gollancz published the 2002 Discworld calendar, entirely made up of pictures by Josh Kirby. They also published the 2002 Diary - The Thieves’ Guild Diary. October 2001 saw the publication of The Last Hero, featuring Cohen the Barbarian, the Silver Hoard, and a cast of thousands, amazingly illustrated by Paul Kidby. This was followed a couple of weeks later by The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, which won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book of the year. (Sadly, October 2001 also saw the death of Josh Kirby, aged seventy-two. It must be true to say that outside America – and for many there – the first Discworld book every fan acquired would have had a Kirby picture on its cover.)
Terry’s second collaboration Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld II - The Globe, was published by Ebury Press in May 2002, followed in November by Night Watch, the first Discworld novel without a Josh Kirby cover on it (if you don’t count our first edition of The Colour of Magic, which was published before Josh was selected to do the covers). Instead it had a magnificent Paul Kidby painting based on Rembrandt’s ‘The Nightwatch’.
In Autumn 2002 (the year Terry’s sales accounted for 4.3% of the UK’s general retail market for hardback fiction), Gollancz published The (Reformed) Vampyre’s Diary and a Calendar with work by a number of artists, both for 2003, a year that has seen the publication of Monstrous Regiment, The New Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs) and The Wee Free Men, a novel for younger readers, set on Discworld, featuring the Nac Mac Feegle and a young girl discovering she has witch-powers, Tiffany Aching. This won the 2004 W.H.Smith People's Choice Book Award in the Teen Choice Category. (Terry hadn't realised that a £5,000 cheque came with the prize until on his way home he opened the envelope he was given with the trophy and discovered it.) It has also won the Locus Award for the Best Young Adult Novel of 2003. Terry’s second novel featuring Tiffany Aching, A Hat Full of Sky, which brings Granny Weatherwax in as a major player, was published at the end of April 2004.
Going Postal, the thirty-third novel in the Discworld sequence, was published in October 2004 (with an ever-enlarged selection of stamps emanating from the Cunning Artificer, Bernard Pearson, some of which are reproduced on the book’s end-papers), followed by The Art of Discworld, which has Terry’s text accompanying Paul Kidby’s illustrations. This should have been published in 2003, but it involved much more work for Paul than he expected, and he could not meet the original deadline. There wasn’t any time for producing illustrations for a diary either – not that Terry had been able to decide on a suitable theme for it – so there were no 2004 or 2005 diaries, only calendars.
Autumn 2004 celebrated the 21st anniversary of the publication of the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic (which has sold well over a million copies in the Corgi edition alone), and to mark this Transworld (in association with Colin Smythe Ltd) issued an anniversary hardcover edition of it with a photographic black and gold cover, as well as the next six novels in paperback with similar cover designs. Later titles are also appearing in this alternative format.
The third Science of Discworld book with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, called Darwin’s Watch, was published in May 2005, and his next Discworld novel, Thud!, appeared at the beginning of October (and apart from its usual appearance at the top of the British bestsellers list, it also reached the no.4 position in that of the New York Times – the first time in the top ten there). At the same time the publishers issued a short picture book, Where’s My Cow? illustrated by Melvyn Grant, which shows Sam Vimes reading it to his young son, as described in Thud!, but adding his ‘improvements’. This book, the ‘Children’s Winner of the Ankh-Morpork Librarians’ Award’, was written by an Ankh-Morpork author, one Terry Pratchett, whose portrait even hangs in a corner of Young Sam’s nursery. Unfortunately, no biographical details of this author appear in it, and he has not yet featured in any of Terry’s other Discworld books.
2006 started with Terry completing Wintersmith, the third Tiffany Aching novel, the appearance of a three-part adaptation of Johnny and the Bomb on BBC1 TV, the announcement that Sam Raimi plans to direct Wee Free Men (after completing the third Spiderman film – see Variety’s news story or Empire.com’s and the BBC’s.
In his report on himself on the jacket of Carpe Jugulum, Terry noted that he lived behind a keyboard in Wiltshire, ‘where he answers letters in a desperate attempt to find time to write. He used to grow carnivorous plants, but now they’ve taken over the greenhouse and he avoids going in. He feels it may be time to get a life, since apparently they’re terribly useful.’ On the jackets of The Fifth Elephant and The Truth, however, he had decided that he didn’t want to get a life, because it feels as though he’s trying to lead three already. More recently, he’s given up mentioning any ambitions, but with something like 55 million copies of his books in print worldwide, and being published in 35 languages, there is no doubt that he is, as his publishers describe him, ‘one of Britain’s best-loved writers’.
COPYRIGHT © 1999-2008 BY COLIN SMYTHE
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