![]() ![]() He published his first story at 15, left school at 17 to work on his local paper, married the first girl who fell into his lap – literally she tripped at a party – and for the rest of his life remained “the most married person you were ever likely to meet”. Decades later, Pratchett made a point of replying to the thousands of fans who wrote to him. ![]() As a teenager, he wrote a fan-letter to Tolkien, who wrote back. The son of a mechanic and a secretary, Pratchett was born in 1948 in the Chilterns (a chalk landscape that haunts his books), in a house with no electricity or running water. What matters are the uncomfortable woollen socks his hero Sam Vimes wears, uncomplainingly, because his wife Sibyl knitted them. What matters, in Pratchett’s world, is what he called “headology” – the commonsensical psychology behind the petty acts of cruelty and kindness that comprise most human behaviour. It’s not even the jokes that matter, though few writers since Wodehouse have stuffed a page with so many. His Discworld novels may have taken place on a flat planet held aloft by four elephants and a turtle, but that’s not what matters in them. The joy of this biography by Rob Wilkins, Pratchett’s personal assistant from around 2000 onwards, is that it spins magic from mundanity in precisely the way Pratchett himself did. Like most authors, Terry Pratchett had a dull life. ![]()
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