Philip Pullman - About the Author
Phillip Pullman was born in Norwich England in 1946. His father and later his stepfather were in the Royal Air Force and the family lived in many different countries. Many of his early years were spent in Australia and then, at the age of eleven, he began living in Wales.
He majored in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and became a middle school teacher. He later taught classes at Westminster College, Oxford until he began writing full time.
His writing is done in a shed in his garden at his home in Oxford. It contains two comfortable chairs, innumerable books, a six-foot stuffed rat, a guitar, a saxophone and a computer decorated with artificial flowers.
Pullman has won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Fiction Prize for "The Golden Compass". "The Amber Spyglass" was the first children's book in history to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and was also nominated for the Booker Prize.
Phillip Pullman on Reading and Writing
Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.
My favorite stories for a long time were ghost stories. I used to enjoy frightening myself and my friends with the tales I read, and making up stories about a tree in the woods we used to call the Hanging Tree, creeping past it in the dark and shivering as we looked at the bare, sinister outline against the sky.
Superman on the radio was exciting enough, but when I first saw a Superman comic, it changed my life. I had to argue with my parents about them, though, because they weren't "proper" reading. I suppose what persuaded them to let me carry on reading comics was the fact that I was also reading books just as greedily, and that I was good at spelling; so obviously the comics weren't harming me too much.
The most valuable thing I've learned about writing is to keep going, even when it's not coming easily. You sometimes hear people talk about something called "writer's block." Do doctors get doctor's block? Of course they don't. They work even when they don't want to. There are times when writing is very hard, too and when staring at the empty page is miserable toil. Tough. Your job is to sit there and make things up, so do it.
I have learned some of the laws of a story. Not rules - rules can be changed. Laws such as the law of gravity can't be changed: gravity is there whether we approve of it or not. And so are the laws of a story. A story that is unresolved will not satisfy-that's a law. If a scene does not advance the story, it will get in the way-that's another law. You must know exactly where your story begins-that's a third. And so on.
If the young boy I used to be could have looked ahead in time and seen the man I am today, writing stories in his shed, would he have been pleased? I wonder. Would that child who loved Batman comics and ghost stories approve of the novels I earn my living with now? I hope so. I hope he's still with me. I'm writing them for him.
-- Courtesy of Random House Children's Books
