originally to appear in the printed version of the next issue,
we had to throw most of the biography out due to
reasons of limited space.
The new things first and then later the real bio...
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 of Carpe Jugulum.
So
far, the Doubleday hardcover edition of The Fifth Elephant has sold
over
200,000 copies in the UK, and Carpe Jugulum over 400,000.
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. (Another possible title had
been
Printer™s Devil.) It is the first Discworld novel to have simultaneous
publication in Britain and America, and is being followed by Thief
of Time,
due for publication in May 2001, featuring Susan, History Monks, the
Auditors, the Five Horsemen (including the one who left before they
became
famous) and even chocolate coffee beans....
A short (35,000 word) Discworld book, The Last Hero, featuring
Cohen the
Barbarian, the Silver Hoard, and a cast of ?thousands, and to be fully
illustrated by Paul Kidby, has been drafted to allow Paul to get to
work on
the colour pictures, of which there will be over seventy, and this
is due for
publication by Gollancz in Autumn 2001.
In August Gollancz published the 2001 Discworld calendar in place
of the Ink
Group, who issued those for 1999 and 2000. Artists whose work appears
in it
are Josh Kirby, Paul Kidby, and Graham Higgins (whose Guards! Guards!
The Big
Comic was published in early December), Jay Hurst and Colin MacNeil.
The 2002
Calendar will be entirely made up of pictures by Josh Kirby.
Terry is presently working on a novel for younger Discworld fans, The
Amazing
Maurice and His Educated Rodents - think The Pied Piper of Hamelin™
set on
the Discworld. Maybe he'll write a non-Discworld novel after that.
In his report on himself on the jacket of Carpe Jugulum, Terry noted
that he
lives 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
jacket of The Fifth Elephant and The Truth, however, he's decided that
he
doesn't want to get a life, because it feels as though he's trying
to lead
three alread.
go back to the
FTL home-page
--------------------------------
Yes, there is a similar version out there on -L-space on the net
but Colin gave us Permission to use it, he wrote that
this bio is rather intended for general use.
So be it and there you can read it and know all you ever whated
to know and possibly more. As a scientist I found his experience he gained
while working for an atomic power station
quite intriguing, more can be read in his science book The science
of Discworld. But if you pay close attention it leaks into many of his
other books take for example "small gods".
Come to think of it, it;s rather an achivement: successfully staying
in the fantasy gendre without forcing the reader to forget about quantum
mechanics. That;'s waht story tellers live to do.
The bio also shows that he did learn his trade - seems millions of pounds did not fall accidentely from the sky but are the fruit of hard earned work and a livelong passion for jobs which include writing stories.
Terry 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 National Council
for the Training of Journalists proficiency class and also passed an A
level in English 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 after some delays (not unusual for a small
publisher) we published it in 1971, with a launch party in the carpet department
of Heal's in Tottenham Court Road. We both wrote a blurb and as each wouldn't
give way as to which would be used, we 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 hanndful of copies - can
only be guessed. It was obvious that here was an author we had to publish.
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, he returned to the Press in 1972 as a sub-editor, and on 3 September 1973 joined the Bath 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, but they failed to market his works properly - their being taken over by Routledge at the time did not help matters - and I was able to get them to forego their option for the next title, The Colour of Magic, and interest Diane Pearson at Corgi, and she in turn convinced the company 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, and the BBC later broadcast his third novel, Equal Rites, also on 'Woman's Hour'. At the time, I was informed 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 incapable of coping with bestsellers, and that this should be done while we were friends. I suggested to a friend of mine at Gollancz, David Burnett, that they should consider taking Terry onto their SF list, 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. 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 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 best-seller list. Recently I read that Reaper Man was
the eighth fastest-selling novel in Britain in the past five years: a remarkable
achievement for any book, let alone a so-called 'genre' novel.
1996 saw the publication
of the third Johnny Maxwell novel, Johnny and the Bomb, as well as 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 to date has
been eight 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 containing The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, entitled
The First Discworld Novels
(Colin Smythe Ltd. £16.99) and the paperback edition of The Last
Continent, (Corgi, £5.99), 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 is now the decade's best-selling living fiction author, with over
ten and half million sales during the 1990s , and now running at over a
million
and a quarter books a year.
During the four years' existence of the British BookTrack's weekly bestselling
chart, over 60 titles have been constantly 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 last autumn, 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.
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.
His work for the Orang-Utan
Foundation is common knowledge, but what is less well-known is that he
recently did 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 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 in June, 'for services to literature'.
The initial soundings-out from Downing Street about it came as such a
surprise to him that initially
he thought it must be an elaborate hoax. However, accompanied by his family,
he duly turned up at 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 granted doctorates
of
the Unseen University to
Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, co-authors of The Science of Discworld).
The Fifth Elephant (the working
title of which had been Uberwald Nights) was published in November 1999,
as will 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
of Carpe Jugulum. So far, the Doubleday hardcover edition of the
hardcover edition of The
Fifth Elephant has sold over 200,000 copies in the UK, and Carpe Jugulum
over 200,00.
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. (Another possible title had been
Printer's Devil.) It is
the first Discworld novel to have simultaneous publication in Britain and
America, and is being followed by Thief of Time, due for publication in
May
2001, featuring Susan, History
Monks, the Auditors, the Five Horsemen (including the one who left before
they became famous) and even chocolate coffee beans....
A short (35,000 word) Discworld
novel, The Last Hero, featuring Cohen the Barbarian, the Silver Hoard,
and a cast of thousands, and to be fully illustrated by Paul Kidby, has
been drafted to allow Paul
to get to work on the colour pictures, of which there will be over seventy,
and this is due for publication by Gollancz in 2001.
In August Gollancz published
the 2001 Discworld calendar in place of the Ink Group, who issued those
for 1999 and 2000. Artists whose work appears in it are Josh Kirby, Paul
Kidby, and Graham Higgins
(whose Guards! Guards! The Big Comic was published in early December),
Jay Hurst and Colin MacNeil. The 2002 Calendar will be entirely made
up of pictures by Josh Kirby.
Terry is presently working
on a novel for younger Discworld fans, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated
Rodents - think "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" set on the Discworld.
Maybe he'll write a non-Discworld
novel after that.
In his report on himself
on the jacket of Carpe Jugulum, Terry noted that he lives 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 jacket of
The Fifth Elephant and The Truth, however, he's decided that he doesn't
want to get a life, because it feels as though he's trying to lead three
already.
----------------------------------
And here a short bio excerpt of his pubisher Colin
A keen SF and fantasy
reader, having been introduced to the works of
Tolkien, Lewis, Edison and others at university, he was fortunate to
meet
Terry in 1968 and be shown the typescript of The Carpet People, which
Colin
Smythe Ltd. published in 1971, so 1996 was the 25th anniversary
of its
publication. The company published Terry's next four books, before
coming to
an arrangement with Victor Gollancz, whereby the next three titles
were
jointly published, but then he became Terry's agent. He sold American
rights
to The Dark Side of the Sun by giving readings of extracts from it
at the
company's stand at the Frankfurter Buchmesse. The next fantasy author
published by the company was Hugh Cook, four of whose books it published
in
hardcover, but the weakening of the UK library market made hardcover
publishing of such books uneconomical, so the rest of Cook's Chronicles
of
an Age of Darkness were only published in paperback, by Corgi...
Since 1987, CS has
been acting as Terry's agent, which has involved
him in a completely different world from the rather academic one he
had been
used to and rather more interesting and challenging than publishing.
Once
one has edited, proofread, printed and published over 500 books, it
must be
said that the novelty has somewhat worn off, whereas as an agent working
for
someone as successful as Terry, there is little repetition: one is
constantly
learning and gaining experience, not only in the field of publishing,
but in
film, television, and merchandising, negotiating, acting as go-between
not
only between Terry and the companies involved, but also between the
different
companies, sending press cuttings to and answering questions from Pratchett
fans all over the world for their school or university work - as well
as
fending off individuals hoping to make a quick buck out of what are
very
valuable properties.