Background

Philip Pullman was born on October 19, 1946, in Norwich, England. He is the son of Audrey Evelyn Pullman and Royal Air Force pilot Alfred Outram Pullman. The family traveled with his father's job, including to Southern Rhodesia, though most of his formative years were spent in Llanbedr in Ardudwy, North Wales. His father was killed in a plane crash in 1954 in Kenya when Pullman was seven.

Education

From 1957 Philip was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech, Gwynedd. From 1963 he attended Exeter College, Oxford, receiving a Third class Bachelor of Arts in 1968.

Career

After studying English at the University of Oxford, Pullman remained resident in Oxford, working as a teacher at Bishop Kirk Middle School in Summertown, North Oxford. Meanwhile, he began writing novels. His first titles - The Haunted Storm and Galatea - were oriented toward an adult audience. In the 1980s and ’90s Pullman began writing many titles for children and young adults, beginning with Count Karlstein and Ride of the Demon Huntsman. Pullman’s Sally Lockhart detective stories, set in Victorian London, were published between 1985 and 1994.

Pullman taught part-time at Westminster College, Oxford, between 1988 and 1996, continuing to write children's stories. He began work on His Dark Materials, which centres on Lyra Belacqua (or Lyra Silvertongue), a young girl who lives in a parallel world ruled by the sinister Church (or Magisterium). Northern Lights, the first volume of the trilogy, was adapted into a major motion picture in 2007. It was followed by The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Each book was subsequently adapted into a BBC radio play, and the entire trilogy was adapted into two stage plays and performed at London’s National Theatre. In addition, Pullman wrote a series of companion works centring on various characters featured in the series.

In 2017 Pullman released La Belle Sauvage, the first of three planned installments in his The Book of Dust series. It continues the story of Lyra, chronicling her life both before and after His Dark Materials. However, rather than describing it as a prequel or sequel, Pullman claimed that The Book of Dust trilogy was an “equel.”

Among Pullman’s other works are How to Be Cool, The Broken Bridge, The White Mercedes, which was reissued and adapted as the film The Butterfly Tattoo, The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, The Scarecrow and the Servant, and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version collected Pullman’s retellings of the titular German children’s parables. In 2017 he published the graphic novel The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship, which featured illustrations by Fred Fordham. Pullman’s works were translated into many languages. In 2018 Pullman published Dæmon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling, in which he discussed his approach to writing as well as his influences. The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth is expected to be published in October 2019.

In June 2008, Pullman became a Fellow supporting the MA in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University. In October 2009, he became a patron of the Palestine Festival of Literature. He is also a patron of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, a charity that enables school children across the UK to perform Shakespeare in professional theatres. He continues to deliver talks and writes occasionally for The Guardian, including writing and lecturing about education, where he is often critical of unimaginative education policies.

Achievements

• Philip Pullman is a prolific author. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945". In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Pullman was named the eleventh most influential person in British culture. His most well-known work is the trilogy His Dark Materials. These books have been honoured by several prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children's Book Award, and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

Works

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  • The Firework-Maker's Daughter

    (From the author of The Golden Compass comes a fantastical...)

    1999
  • Count Karlstein

    (Can you hear the distant howling of hounds and the thunde...)

    1998
  • Shadow in the North

    (In 1878 in London, Sally, now twenty-two and established ...)

    1988
  • The Tin Princess

    (Days after she witnesses a mysterious explosion in 19th-c...)

    1994
  • Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version

    (#1 New York Times bestseller Philip Pullman retells the w...)

    2012
  • Clockwork

    (Borrowing elements of Frankenstein, Pinocchio, and Faust,...)

    1998
  • The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

    (By challenging the events of the gospels, Pullman puts fo...)

    2010
  • Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling

    (At once personal and wide-ranging, Daemon Voices is both ...)

    2018
  • The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship

    (Trapped in the mists of time by a terrible research exper...)

    2017
  • The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth

    (Lyra Silvertongue's adventures in the North are long over...)

    2019
  • The White Mercedes

    (A chance meeting with Jenny at an Oxford party leaves sev...)

    1993
  • His Dark Materials: Serpentine

    (This companion to His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust...)

    2020
  • The Amber Spyglass

    (Throughout the worlds, the forces of both heaven and hell...)

    2000
  • The Golden Compass

    (Philip Pullman takes readers to a world where humans have...)

    1996
  • The Tiger in the Well: A Sally Lockhart Mystery

    (Sally is completely independent, with her own successful ...)

    1990
  • The Scarecrow and His Servant

    (A tattered scarecrow stands in the middle of a muddy fiel...)

    2005
  • Northern Lights: His Dark Materials

    (Lyra Belacqua and her animal daemon live half-wild and ca...)

    2011
  • How to be Cool

    (A special TV tie-in edition of an extraordinarily scarce ...)

    1987
  • Mossycoat

    (A revived version of this well-known story, which has bee...)

    1998
  • The Subtle Knife

    (Lost in a new world, Lyra finds Will - a boy on the run, ...)

    1997
  • Detective Stories

    (Young mystery fans will be enthralled by this compelling ...)

    1998
  • The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage

    (Malcolm Polstead is the kind of boy who notices everythin...)

    2017
  • Spring-Heeled Jack

    (Spring-Heeled Jack: The name evoked awe from both crimina...)

    2002
  • The Ruby in the Smoke: A Sally Lockhart Mystery

    (When she first utters these words, 16-year-old Sally Lock...)

    2008
  • Lyra's Oxford

    (It is an exciting tale set in the world of Philip Pullman...)

    2003
  • The Tiger in the Well

    (Sally Lockhart is 25, and somebody wants to destroy her. ...)

    2018
  • I Was a Rat!

    (So insists a scruffy boy named Roger. Maybe it’s true. Bu...)

    2002
  • Once Upon a Time in the North 2017
  • The Broken Bridge 1992
  • Thunderbolt's Waxwork 1996
  • Galatea 1976

Politics

Pullman has a strong commitment to traditional British civil liberties and is noted for his criticism of growing state authority and government encroachment into everyday life. In February 2009, he was the keynote speaker at the Convention on Modern Liberty in London and wrote an extended piece in The Times condemning the Labour government for its attacks on basic civil rights. Later, he and other authors threatened to stop visiting schools in protest at new laws requiring them to be vetted to work with youngsters - though officials claimed that the laws had been misinterpreted.

Views

Although Pullman has stated he is a Church of England atheist, he has also said he is technically an agnostic. He has singled out elements of Christianity for criticism: "if there is a God, and he is as the Christians describe him, then he deserves to be put down and rebelled against." However, he said that his argument can extend to all religions.

Readers and critics alike considered Pullman a worthy successor to J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, and C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia. However, while Lewis portrayed religion in a positive light, Pullman, who was a vocal atheist, wrote of the abuses of organized religion and instead embraced a humanistic morality. The series attracted criticism from those who believed it was an attack on the Catholic church.

Membership

Pullman is a member of the Blake Society and the Society of Authors.

Connections

Pullman married Judith Speller in 1970.

Father:

Alfred Outram Pullman

Mother:

Audrey Evelyn Pullman

Spouse:

Judith Speller Pullman

Son:

Jamie Pullman

Son:

Tom Pullman