Philip Pullman

Best-known for His Dark Materials – a fantasy trilogy that brought awards and great acclaim as well as controversy – Philip Pullman was named one of the most influential people in British culture by the BBC in 2004 and knighted in 2019 for his services to literature. ...

Pullman was born in 1946 in Norwich and spent parts of his childhood in Zimbabwe and Australia. His father, an RAF pilot, died in a plane crash in Kenya when Philip was nine and the following year his mother remarried and the family moved to North Wales. After completing a degree in English at Exeter College, Oxford, Pullman spent several years teaching the subject, despite his frustrations at the emphasis on testing and league tables rather than ‘a true, imaginative and humane engagement with literature’.

After two early novels (The Haunted Storm and Galatea) he wrote his first children’s book, Count Karlstein, as a play for his students at Bishop Kirk Middle School in 1982, then the four books centring on teenager Sally Lockhart, whose adventures in Victorian London see her uncover numerous mysteries.

A handful of standalone novels followed before Northern Lights was published in 1995, beginning Lyra’s epic adventure through parallel worlds in search of knowledge about the enigmatic Dust. The book received both the Carnegie Medal and Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, and prompted a full-time writing career, but as the series developed so did the controversy. While there was widespread discussion about the ‘meaning’ of His Dark Materials and the challenge levelled at the books’ ruling theocracy, Pullman declared ‘I’m not in the message business. I’m in the “Once upon a time” business’.

Since then, Pullman’s views on topics including the monarchy, tabloid journalism, civil liberties and ‘gesture politics’ have also reached the headlines, alongside his calls for fair payment for authors. Committed to open discussion as well as writing fiction, Pullman resigned as President of the Society of Authors in 2022 in order to ‘be free to express my personal opinions’; he has now authored some 30 novels as well as short story collections, picture books and graphic novels.