The Westport Library Resource Guides: Terry Pratchett: About

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Who was Terry Pratchett?

Pratchett was raised in Buckinghamshire, the son of an engineer and a secretary. He became enamoured with science fiction and fantasy at a young age and published his first story, “The Hades Business,” in a school magazine in 1961. The story was published commercially two years later in Science Fantasy magazine. At age 17 Pratchett left school in order to pursue a career in journalism. About this time he began working on his first novel, The Carpet People, which was published in 1971 (it was heavily revised and republished in 1992). The lighthearted tale, aimed at children, centres on the exploits of two brothers who live inside a carpet and battle the evil concept of Fray.

Pratchett continued to work in newspaper journalism and then in public relations throughout the 1970s and most of the ’80s. He published two more stand-alone novels, The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981), before the first book in his Discworld series, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. The series continued with The Light Fantastic (1986), which was quickly followed by Equal Rites (1986) and Mort (1987). In 1987 Pratchett left his office job to become a full-time writer.

Pratchett’s Discworld series, a collection of satirical fantasy novels set on a disc-shaped world that rests on the backs of four giant elephants atop a humongous turtle, proved wildly popular worldwide, and he published one or more nearly every year into the early 21st century. The series also spawned video games, plays, television adaptations, and several supplemental volumes, including books of maps of the Discworld. While the bulk of the series was aimed at an adult audience, it was also popular with children, and Pratchett penned several novels that were set on the Discworld and aimed specifically at a younger audience. Continue reading from Encyclopedia Britannica