Who is Philip Pullman?
Philip Pullman was born in 1946 in Norwich. He was the son of RAF fighter pilot who was shot down and killed in Rhodesia seven years later during the Mau Mau rebellion. In an interview on Amazon.com, Pullman says, ‘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.’ His mother remarried two years later to another RAF pilot, and Philip and his brother moved to Australia with them for 18 months. This early experience of travelling long distances by sea, and then living in a very different place, had a significant impact on Philip and his subsequent writing. He came back to school in Britain – a prep school in London, and then boarding school in north Wales. It was not easy being a new boy at school – particularly whe
Philip Pullman, born in England in 1946, is a British scholar and author, well known for writing the controversial trilogy His Dark Materials. While Pullman’s novels are ostensibly for children, they have drawn adult attention, particularly His Dark Materials, because the books deal with many adult themes and issues. Philip Pullman was born in Norwich, England, and his father was a Royal Air Force pilot. Philip and his mother moved with his father’s postings until his father’s death in 1953. Many of Pullman’s books deal with the themes of orphaned or fatherless children and family relations. His mother remarried and moved the family to Australia, where Philip Pullman was first exposed to comic books and fantasy literature. In 1963, Philip Pullman attended Exeter College, Oxford, and after graduating, he married Judith Speller and began teaching children. Pullman also wrote school plays and published several books and collections of plays, beginning in 1972 with the publication of The H
A Christian-bashing God hater or, as the liberal Catholic writer Donna Freitas has argued, a profoundly unorthodox religious thinker? A propagandist for godlessness or a master of storytelling whose enchantment draws in both children and adults? This much is certain: His blend of fantasy and philosophy has been highly successful. The Dark Materials trilogy, hailed for skillful plotting, exquisite prose style, and imaginative fantastic landscapes as well as challenging ideas, has sold about 12 million copies worldwide. (The Golden Compass, published in 1995, was followed in 1997 by the second volume, The Subtle Knife, and then in 2000 by The Amber Spyglass, which became the first children’s book to win the prestigious Whitbread Prize for literature.) The series has earned Pullman a devoted following among well-educated adults as well as children. The books’ greatest strengths are several memorable characters—above all the spunky and precocious 12-year-old heroine, Lyra Belacqua, raised
