PULLMAN, Philip

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

Philip Pullman is an English novelist, named one of the top 50 greatest writers since 1945 by The Times. He was born in Norwich but spent many of his early years in Llanbedr, North Wales. In 1965, Pullman attended Exeter College, Oxford receiving a Third class BA. In 1970 he began teaching in a middle school while writing. He decided to leave this job after the publication of The Ruby In The Smoke in 1986. Between 1988 and 1996 Pullman taught part time at Westminster College, Oxford and began His Dark Materials series, the work for which he is best known. The first book, The Northern Lights was published in 1995 and won several prizes including the Carnegie Medal. It was published as The Golden Compass in the USA and the film adaptation in 2007 shared the American title.

To many fans' delight Pullman began work on a continuation of his His Dark Materials canon with The Book of Dust series, of which the first installment was published in 2017, La Belle Sauvage.