Sir Terence David John Pratchett (28 April 1948 – 12 March 2015) was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for the Discworld series of 41 comic fantasy novels published between 1983 and 2015, and for the apocalyptic comedy novel Good Omens (1990), which he co-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 an 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 three television programmes chronicling his experiences with the condition for the BBC, and became a patron of ARUK. Pratchett died on 12 March 2015, at the age of 66.
Pratchett was born on 28 April 1948 in Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, England, the only child of David (1921–2006), a mechanic, and Eileen Pratchett (neé Kearns) (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 disliked by the head teacher, who, Pratchett 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's 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 in Science Fantasy magazine when he was 15.
Pratchett earned five O-levels and started A-level courses in Art, English and History. He completed his English A-level while on day release from his apprenticeship, and took the National Council for the Training of Journalists proficiency course.
Shorts and early novels (1965–1982)
Pratchett left school at aged 17, in 1965, to start a career in journalism. He began this with an apprenticeship with Arthur Church, the editor of the Bucks Free Press. In this position he wrote, among other things, more than 80 stories for the Children's Circle section under the name Uncle Jim. These were published regularly by the outlet, with the first on 8 October 1965. Pratchett said in later interviews that he struggled with other aspects of journalism, such as door-step interviews. In November 1965 he had a short story called Night Dweller published in New Worlds magazine. In 1968 Pratchett interviewed Peter Bander van Duren, co-director of a small publishing company, Colin Smythe Ltd. Pratchett mentioned that 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. Between September 1970 and April 1971 he worked for the Western Daily Press before being fired by the then editor Eric Price and going back to work at the Bucks Free Press where he worked as a sub editor.
Beginning in 1972 he also wrote short fiction under the pen name "Patrick Kearns" which was serialized in the Western Daily Press. The use of a different pen name was likely because he was officially working for other papers at the time. The "Kearns" title was his mother's maiden name. He wrote 20 stories for the paper between then and 1984, shortly after publishing the first Discworld book. As a consequence of the pen name, the stories remained essentially unknown until a 2023 investigation. It had previously been thought that he became inactive as a writer at times but this was not the case. The works are known as the "Lost Stories" and are collected in A Stroke of the Pen. He remained- officially- with the Bucks Free Press through the 1970s, and published one further novel while working there, the science fiction novel The Dark Side of the Sun (1976).
In 1979 he took a job as press officer for the South West Region of the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) in an area that contained 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". While working there he wrote his next science fiction novel Strata (1981).
Discworld and success (1983–2015)
The first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in hardback by Colin Smythe Ltd in 1983. The setting would come to dominate his writing career, though he did also publish the serial The Quest for the Keys (1984) using his "Patrick Kearns" pen name the following year; the final work under the moniker.
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 bestseller lists; he was the UK's bestselling author of the 1990s. According to The Times, Pratchett was the top-selling and highest earning UK author in 1996. Some of his books were published by Doubleday, another Transworld imprint. He began writing two books per year after becoming a full time writer, aiming to write 1,000 words per day alongside his schedule of public appearances and marketing work.
In the 2000s he reduced the schedule to a single book per year. His works began to take on a darker tone with deeper consideration of their themes. According to the Bookseller's 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 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). In 2005,Thud! became Pratchett's first New York Times bestseller.
His diagnosis with Alzheimer's disease in 2007 affected his writing. Statistical analysis of his works has indicated a decline in the variation of his vocabulary beginning in 1998; indicating that there had been a decade-long preclinical period, something unnoticed by readers and possibly himself. His experience was primarily one of physical rather than mental decline; this led him to rely upon dictation and a personal assistant in his later years as he could no longer type. His final works were nonetheless both critically and commercially successful; Snuff (2011) became the third-fastest-selling hardback adult-readership novel since records began in the UK, selling 55,000 copies in the first three days. His final work was The Shepherd's Crown (2015), published after his death.