![[hand on pate]](pullman.jpg)
[pic source] [pix] [pic] [pic] [pic][Up: Favorite authors] [Robot Wisdom home page]
"We are all stupid, and we are all intelligent. The line dividing the stupid from the intelligent goes right down the middle of our heads." [cite]
[pic source] [pix] [pic] [pic] [pic]
NEW: 60min audio [WinMedia only]
NEW: Dark Materials annotations incl maps
1946: 19Oct: Philip Nicholas Outram(?) born in Norwich (father RAF fighter pilot Alfred Outram, mother Audrey Evelyn Merrifield)
1948: brother Francis born
move to Rhodesia
1953: father killed
"Peter Dickinson and I were talking one day and this subject came up and we agreed how strange it was that so many children's authors had lost one or both parents in their childhood. My father died in a plane crash when I was seven, and naturally I was preoccupied for a long time by the mystery of what he must have been like." [cite]
age nine: favorite year [cite]
1955? mother remarries (Pullman is stepfather's name?); move to Australia for 18 months
thrilled to discover Superman and Batman comic books "I would've been in my seventh heaven of bliss if I could've gotten a job writing Batman comics." [cite]
favorite book: Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding [info] [etext] also loves Arthur Ransome's 'Swallows and Amazons' [review]
"before I was 11, I'd gone on several long sea voyages" [cite]
1957: posh prep school in Battersea (bad dream: anecdote)
1957-1963? school in North Wales (Ysgol Ardudwy, Harlech, Gwynedd); time with grandfather (Anglican rector in Norfolk) "We lived up in the woods, about a mile above a very small village, right at the edge of a hill. We just wandered all over the place, there were no boundaries..." [cite]
learns to write clearly from Miss Enid Jones [cite] [passim] writes sonnets
1961: uses book-token to buy 'The Picture History of Painting' by H.W. and D.J. Janson [influential]
1962: loves 'Paradise Lost' [etext]
"I found it intensely enthralling, not only the actual story... but also the landscapes, the power of the poetry and the extraordinary majesty of the language" [cite]
1962? personal vision(?) of 'harpies' "[My view of the] world of the dead... comes largely from classical mythology... together with some very personal things about the harpies that come out of my own mythology, going back to when I was 16. Eight years after that (30 years ago now) I saw Blake's illustrations to Dante, and felt a jolt of shocked recognition." [cite]
1963? Exeter College, Oxford (studies English)
1965: meets future agent, Caradoc King [cite] [info]
1965: reads Tolkien (exciting but lacking psychology, cf Jane Austen, George Eliot) [reactions]
"By realistic I mean if it is talking about human beings in a way which is vivid and truthful and tells me things about myself and my own emotions and things which I recognise to be true having encountered it in a story." [cite]
'being hippies'
1968: meets Tolkien [feeble anecdote]
1968: BA from Oxford
1969? wins New English Library first-novel competition??? [cite] (this is probably mistaken)
works at Moss Brothers [formalwear]
librarian
1970? 'shock of recognition' seeing Blake's illustrations of Hell [cite]
1970: marries Judith Speller [hypnotherapist?]
1971: son Jamie (now a viola player: bio)
teacher training
no-date: unpublished first novel [cite]
1972-1986: middle-school teacher (pre-teens); writes school plays
1982? son Tom born (now a music student)
1988-1996: part-time lecturer at Westminster College, Oxford (courses on Victorian novel; folk tale; and how words and pictures fit together)
1984: Polka Children's Theatre, Wimbledon produces 'Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Sumatran Devil' with six-foot-long stuffed rat [passim]
1985: Polka Children's Theatre, Wimbledon produces 'The Three Musketeers'
1987? 5yo Tom bites chunk out of glass as PP retells 'Odyssey' [anecdote]
1988: International Reading Association Children's Book Award
1990: play: Frankenstein
no-date:wants to write "something big on the themes of innocence and experience" [cite]
idea for HDM originates "he and his literary agent found themselves discussing their shared passion for 'Paradise Lost' over a lunch of sausages and mashed potatoes." [cite]
1993: begins trilogy, with general outline of whole [cite] knows it will be published by children's press [cite]
"I started with a picture of Lyra hiding in the wardrobe, and overhearing things that she wasn't meant to hear. And I had pictures of other things in the story-- the bear in armor, and the witches coming up through the clouds." [cite] "I knew exactly where it was going to end. I knew it was going to end in a garden... I knew that Lyra was going to meet Will, and I knew that Will was going to have to search for his father." [cite]
1993? applies for grant to visit Svalbard (rejected) [cite]
editor Liz Cross
1996: Carnegie Medal [speech]
1996: Guardian Children's Fiction Award, British Book Award
no-date: "For the first two years of my acquaintance with it, I used the Internet almost exclusively for e-mail, which is wonderful. Then I began to browse a little, but found it too slow and hard to find what I really wanted-- not that I always know what that is, but it still seems easier in a library among a lot of books than on the screen. I've just woken up to the discussion groups thing-- the Rutgers group, or whatever it is, and suchlike-- and now that I have, I'll probably lurk around the edges of that for a while."
1998: Oct: attacks CS Lewis in UK Guardian essay 'The Dark Side of Narnia' [etext] [debate]
"I have always praised many of the things he has said about children's literature and narrative and so on. What's more, since we've mentioned Screwtape, a good deal of the psychology of that book is extremely subtle and perceptive." [afterthoughts]
1998: United Kingdom Reading Award
feels sorry for JK Rowling, unmoved by Harry Potter series [cite]
no-date: movie rights sold to Scholastic Films [info] [more] resold 2002 below
1999: Aug: finishes 1st draft of vol3 "right at the end of Amber Spyglass, after 1200 or more pages, I was still discovering new things I could do with this human-daemon link" [cite]
2000: controversial speech 'The Republic of Heaven' [cite]
"We're used to the kingdom of heaven; but you can tell from the general thrust of the book that I'm of the devil's party, like Milton. And I think it's time we thought about a republic of heaven instead of the kingdom of heaven. The king is dead. That's to say I believe that the king is dead. I'm an atheist. But we need heaven nonetheless, we need all the things that heaven meant, we need joy, we need a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, we need a connection with the universe, we need all the things that the kingdom of heaven used to promise us but failed to deliver. And, furthermore, we need it in this world where we do exist-- not elsewhere, because there ain't no elsewhere." [cite]"We mustn't have another king. Worshipping the wrong thing is going to lead to trouble, so we have to have a republic, by which I mean that we ourselves in this world here in the physical universe where we know we live have got to make it as much like the traditional idea of heaven as we can. By which I mean it's a place where we're connected to other people by love and joy and delight in the universe and the physical world. And we have to use all the qualities we have-- our imagination, our intelligence, our scientific understanding, our appreciation of art, our love for each other and so on-- we have to work to use those things, to make the world a better place, which it sorely needs making." [cite]
"I thought wasn't it a good thing that Eve did, isn't curiosity a valuable quality? Shouldn't she be praised for risking this? It wasn't, after all, that she was after money or gold or anything, she was after knowledge. What could possibly be wrong with that? ...The physical world is our home, this is where we live, we're not creatures from somewhere else or in exile. This is our home and we have to make our homes here and understand that we are physical too, we are material creatures, we are born and we will die." [cite]
2001: Feb: Salon chat session [multipage]
2002: Jan: short essay on classical composer Nicholai Medtner in 'Granta' [etext]
"The first notes held me quiet: a slow steady rocking melody that climbs and returns and climbs again and then just as steadily goes back to its beginning and falls still..."
2002: Apr: Arbuthnot lecture [etext]
2002: wins Whitbread Prize [info]
2002: Scholastic resells movie rights [article]
2002: Jun: reviews Magrs' 'Strange Boy' [UkG] renews attack on CS Lewis [UkG]
daemon of choice: raven [cite] magpie [cite]
craft: "I write by hand-- I use a ball-point pen and lined paper that you can't find in the US-- only in this country. The size is A4. ...I've used this paper for years, and the reason is that when I've written three sides of paper [1100 words-- Then I stop, having made sure to write the first sentence on the next page, so I never have a blank page facing me in the morning], I know I've finished with my day's work. Sometimes it takes me hours! ...When I get stuck with a book, which quite often happens, I like to go to the cafe of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. They do something to their coffee there, I don't know what it is... I am very easily distracted, so some days it takes me a long time to do my work." [cite] explores plotting by shuffling post-it notes [cite] [more] "he weeps, yes, weeps copiously at the tragedies that unfold. He frightens himself and upsets himself and makes himself laugh" [cite]
"something I can't do is tell a story that is set in the present day in an ordinary, everyday family with ordinary, everyday things going on. Some writers can do that, do it brilliantly well.... I can't do that." [cite] "it's like discovering that your daemon has turned out to be a dog and you always wanted a cat: you have to make the best of it. Whether I like it or not, I am a fantasist." [cite]
fave writers: Gary Paulsen, Peter Dickinson, Henrietta Branford, Brian Moore, Jan Mark, Anne Fine, Jacqueline Wilson, Janni Howker, Michael Morpurgo, Allan Ahlberg; comic artist Hergé (Tintin); Wilkie Collins
"The books which have made the most difference to my life have been Grimm's Fairy Tales, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, the Superman and Batman comics which were published when I was young-- i.e. before they became 'dark' and self-consciously post-modernist, The Picture History of Painting by H.W. and D.J. Janson which I bought with a book token when I was fifteen, and Bernard Shaw's Collected Letters." [cite]
hobbies: drawing, woodwork, guitar, saxophone, whiskey, no exercise [more]
faves: composer Nicolai Medtner, a band from Madagascar called Tarika, The Magnificent Seven, Celine and Julie Go Boating (by Jacques Rivette), anything with Cary Grant [cite] [more]
pets: brother and sister pugs: Hogarth or Hogy, and Nellie
bios: UkG, UkObs, fish, NyTimes, Scholastic, RandomH, Locus, Madison, BBC, spoilers?, UkG, Amzn-2pg
list, more, less, detailed, summaries, Scholastic, covers
"He has been publishing books since 1972 ('The first one was so bad, I'm not even going to tell you the title,' he said)..." [cite]
"There's another one, too, which I don't talk about."[cite]
"He won the New English Library first novel competition a year after graduating." [cite!??] (graduated 1968)
Amazon: oop
illustrated by G. Long
graphic and unsettling tale of teenage love
Amazon: oop?
reviews: Shotgun
"set in the world of German Romantic ghost stories... a graphic novel with elements of text"
Amazon: hard
based on his earlier school play
16yo Sally Lockhart searches for a mysterious ruby in 19thC London
Amazon: paper
Amazon: paper
Sally, now 22, is in business as a financial consultant. When she and her friends challenge corrupt financial interests, they find themselves in a web of intrigue...
Amazon: paper
adapted and broadcast by Granada TV as a television show in 1988
illustrated by David Mostyn
"Spring-heeled Jack was a character in Victorian penny dreadfuls. He was, like Batman, a costumed super-hero. Spring-Heeled Jack's costume-- he was supposed to look like the Devil, so he would put springs in his heels... It's partly graphic novel... it's got speech balloons and it's got little poems; but it's got text in between. This I found quite hard to do, because there's a curious thing that happens when you write a story in pictures; it is in the present tense, whether you want it to be or not." [cite]
Amazon: paper
Motherless 16yo Ginny lives with her father in a seaside village in Wales, but her world begins to fall apart when a social worker arrives one day and re-opens old files, for everything her father has told her about the family has been a tapestry of lies...
Amazon: paper
Sally Lockhart is now a young woman, left alone with a toddler. Nothing prepares her for the shock of receiving a summons from a man she has never even heard of, suing for divorce and the custody of her beloved Harriet.
Amazon: paper
Amazon: paper
Victorian adventure
PP did little illustrations (in UK edition only) "The US editors didn't want them, because (they said) it made the book look too like a children's book, and they wanted to sell it to adults as well." [cite]
PP's favorite cover: Amazon
Amazon: hard
Amazon: hard
PP did little illustrations (in UK edition only) [semi-spoiler]
PP's favorite cover: Amazon
Amazon: guidebook
(maybe a different PP altogether?)
"a variation on Cinderella. A little boy turns up at the home of an old childless couple insisting that he was a rat. They don't know what to do with him, so take him in; but gradually his claim that he used to be a rat is taken more and more seriously by various interested parties, including, in increasing order of degradation, a fairground proprietor, the head of a gang of thieves, and a tabloid newspaper." [cite]
Amazon: paper
TV miniseries: IMDb
UK edition has short quotations at start of each chapter "because of the original decision not to use the pix in the US edition, and also because they wanted to get it out in a hurry, Random House didn't use the quotations either" [cite]
Amazon: hard
Amazon: paper-boxed
Amazon: hard
originally called 'Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Sumatran Devil' (1984)
Amazon: paper
"What am I working on now? A film script, but not from one of my books. I think it's a mistake to adapt yourself. This is a trilogy called THE CHANGES, by the great Peter Dickinson-- a strangely prophetic science-fiction or fantasy story first published thirty years ago." [Salon-2001]
"I've mentioned the film I'm supposed to be writing; when I've done that I shall do a short book-- about the length of my CLOCKWORK-- one of the things I call my fairy tales-- like The Firework-Maker's Daughter and I Was A Rat. one of those. Then The Book of Dust [see below]." [cite] "a shorter book than the last one-- a fairy tale along the lines of I Was a Rat" [cite] maybe same as? ghost story 'A Crimson Fever' [cite]
"I might do a companion volume, I don't know yet, in which all sorts of things are spelled out in greater detail, such as the alethiometer and how it works, such as the myth in the background and so on and so forth." [cite] "what I'm going to make a start on later this year [2001]-- a sort of companion volume to the trilogy-- not just a reference book, because it will have a lot of stories in it as well, but among other things it'll go into the whole creation myth which underlies HDM, and which of course explains how angels came about. It will be called THE BOOK OF DUST." [cite] "I want The B of D to be richly illustrated, and to be driven by narrative rather than explanation." [cite] "I wouldn't call my next book a prequel to the trilogy, but it will be more stories from the same world, with some of the same characters." [cite] "I certainly intend to write more stories set in this world. You mention Farder Coram and Serafina Pekkala-- there is a story there, by all means. And there is a story abou t how Lee Scoresby and Iorek Byrnison met for the first time. When we meet them in The GC, they're old comrades: I look forward to writing about their younger days. There are MANY more stories left to write." [cite]
more Sally Lockhart [cite] "I want to bring it up to the mid-1890s because that's when the first true cinema films were made, the first true moving pictures were shown. That's a theme I want to continue, and in 1896 or so, Sally's daughter Harriet will be 16, which is a good age for her to have an adventure, I think, so we'll do that." [cite]
You can submit a new URL or any other suggestion for this page by typing it into the box below. It will instantly become visible to anyone at this comments page. I should get around to checking it out and updating it above within a week or three, at which point I'll delete it from the comments page.
If you want credit, include your name and email (otherwise it's anonymous). You can use HTML but you don't have to.
[Up: Favorite authors] [Site map]
Artist profiles:
Robert Stone Damascus Gate |
Peter Dickinson |
Philip Pullman His Dark Materials |
Lindsey Davis |
Iris Murdoch |
John le Carre |
Tom Wolfe |
Harold Brodkey |
Blanche McCrary Boyd |
William Wharton |
Joseph McElroy |
Ward Just |
G Spencer Brown
music:
Joni Mitchell |
Marta Sebestyen |
Mary Coughlan |
Jane Siberry |
Hal Willner |
Michael Hurley |
Incredible String Band |
Van Dyke Parks
film:
Richard Lester |
Mike Leigh |
Jacques Rivette
misc:
J Krishnamurti |
Stephen Gaskin |
Hero Joy Nightingale
One-layer portals: James Joyce | Thomas Pynchon
Autobiographical:
general |
musical |
internet
Odds and ends:
jazz |
rock |
Nabokov |
Jesus |
Wilde |
Picasso |
Gibbon |
1899
How to make resource pages like these: tutorial
Amazon royalties from these pages go to Sam Smith's
Progressive Review
Hosting provided by instinct.org. Content may be copied under Open Web Content License.
