Philip Pullman
Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman[1] CBE FRSL (born 19 October 1946) is an English writer. His books include the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, a fictionalised biography of Jesus. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945".[2] In a 2004 BBC poll, he was named the eleventh most influential person in British culture.[3][4] He was knighted in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to literature.[5]
Philip Pullman
19 October 1946
Norwich, England
Novelist
English
Carnegie Medal
1995
Guardian Prize
1996
Astrid Lindgren Award
2005
2
Alfred Outram Pullman
Audrey Evelyn Merrifield
Outram Marshall (great-grandfather)
Northern Lights, the first volume in His Dark Materials, won the 1995 Carnegie Medal of the Library Association as the year's outstanding English-language children's book.[6] For the Carnegie's 70th anniversary, it was named in the top ten by a panel tasked with compiling a shortlist for a public vote for an all-time favourite.[7] It won that public vote and was named all-time "Carnegie of Carnegies" in June 2007. It was filmed under the book's US title, The Golden Compass. In 2003, His Dark Materials trilogy ranked third in the BBC's The Big Read, a poll of 200 top novels voted by the British public.[8]
Life and career[edit]
Philip Pullman was born in Norwich, England, the son of Audrey Evelyn Pullman (née Merrifield) and Royal Air Force pilot Alfred Outram Pullman. The family travelled with his father's job, including to Southern Rhodesia, though most of his formative years were spent in Llanbedr in Ardudwy, Wales.[9]
In 1954, when Pullman was seven, his father, an RAF pilot, was killed in a plane crash in Kenya, being posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). In an exchange with a journalist in 2008, Pullman said that, as a boy, he saw his father as "a hero, steeped in glamour, killed in action defending his country", and who had been "training pilots". Pullman was then presented with a report from The London Gazette of 1954 "which carried the official RAF news of the day [and] said that the medal was given for 'gallant and distinguished service' during the Mau Mau uprising. 'The main task of the Harvards [the aircraft flown by his father's unit] had been bombing and machine-gunning Mau Mau and their hideouts in densely wooded and difficult country.' This included 'diving steeply into the gorges of [various] rivers, often in conditions of low cloud and driving rain.' Testing conditions, yes, but not much opposition from the enemy, the journalist in the exchange continued. Very few of the Mau Mau had guns that could land a blow on an aircraft."
Responding to that new information, Pullman wrote: "My father probably doesn't come out of this with very much credit, judged by the standards of modern liberal progressive thought", and he accepted the revelation as "a serious challenge to his childhood memory."[10] In the 2017 BBC series documentary Imagine, Pullman said that he has since become aware that his father could have crashed his plane deliberately, saying "There was something odd about the crash ... he just took his plane up and flew into the side of a hill", citing rumours of his father having debt troubles and a problematic love affair. His mother remarried the following year and, following a move to North Wales, Pullman discovered comic books, including Superman and Batman, a medium which he continues to enjoy.
In his early years, Pullman attended Taverham Hall School and Eaton House[11] and, from 1957, he was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech, Gwynedd, spending time in Norfolk with his grandfather, a clergyman. Around that time, Pullman discovered John Milton's Paradise Lost, which would become a major influence for His Dark Materials.[12]
From 1965, Pullman attended Exeter College, Oxford, receiving a Third-class BA in 1968.[13] In an interview with the Oxford Student, he noted that he "did not really enjoy the English course", and that "I thought I was doing quite well until I came out with my third class degree and then I realised that I wasn't – it was the year they stopped giving fourth class degrees otherwise I'd have got one of those".[14] He discovered William Blake's illustrations around 1970, which would also influence him greatly.
Pullman married Judith Speller in 1970 and they have two sons.[15] At the time of his marriage he began teaching children aged 9 to 13 at Bishop Kirk Middle School in Summertown, North Oxford, as well as writing school plays.
His first published work was The Haunted Storm, which was joint-winner of the New English Library's Young Writer's Award in 1972, but which he refuses to discuss.[16] Galatea, an adult fantasy-fiction novel, followed in 1978, but it was his school plays which inspired his first children's book, Count Karlstein, in 1982. He stopped teaching shortly after the publication of his second children's book, The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), which has a Victorian setting.
Between 1988 and 1996, Pullman taught part-time at Westminster College, Oxford, continuing to write children's stories. He began His Dark Materials in about 1993. The first book, Northern Lights, was published in 1995 (entitled The Golden Compass in the U.S., 1996). Pullman won both the annual Carnegie Medal[6] and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a similar award that authors may not win twice.[17][a]
Pullman has been writing full-time since 1996. He continues to deliver talks and writes occasionally for The Guardian, including writing and lecturing about education, in which he is often critical of unimaginative education policies.[18][19] He was awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours list in 2004. In 2004, he was elected President of the Blake Society.[20] In 2004 Pullman also guest-edited The Mays Anthology, a collection of new writing from students at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
In 2005, Pullman won the annual Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council, recognising his career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense". According to the presentation, "Pullman radically injects new life into fantasy by introducing a variety of alternative worlds and by allowing good and evil to become ambiguous." In every genre, "he combines storytelling and psychological insight of the highest order."[21]
In 2006, he was one of five finalists for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Medal,[22] and he was the British nominee again in 2012.[23]
In 2008, he started working on The Book of Dust, a companion trilogy to his His Dark Materials, and "The Adventures of John Blake", a story for the British children's comic The DFC, with artist John Aggs.[24][25][26]
On 23 November 2007, Pullman was made an honorary professor at Bangor University.[27] 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[28]
On 24 June 2009, Pullman was awarded the degree of D.Litt. (Doctor of Letters), honoris causa, by the University of Oxford at the Encænia ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre.[29]
In 2012, during a break from writing The Book of Dust, Pullman was asked by Penguin Classics to curate 50 of Grimms' classic fairytales, from their compendium of over 200 stories. "They are not all of the same quality", said Pullman. "Some are easily much better than others. And some are obvious classics. You can't do a selected Grimms' without Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella and so on."[30]
On 19 October 2017, the first volume of The Book of Dust was published by Penguin Random House Children's and David Fickling in the UK and by Random House Children's in the US.[31][32] The second title in The Book of Dust, The Secret Commonwealth, published in October 2019, includes a character named after Nur Huda el-Wahabi, a 16-year-old victim of London's Grenfell Tower fire. As part of the charity auction Authors for Grenfell Tower, Pullman offered the highest bidder a chance to name a character in the upcoming trilogy. Ultimately, he raised £32,400.[33]
Pullman was named a Knight Bachelor in the 2019 New Year's Honours list.[5] In March 2019, the charity Action for Children's Art presented Pullman with their annual J. M. Barrie Award to mark a "lifetime's achievement in delighting children".[34]
A lifelong fan of Norwich City F.C.,[35] Pullman penned the foreword to the club's official history, published in 2020.[36]
Awards and Honours[edit]
joint-winner of the New English Library's Young Writer's Award in 1972, but which he refuses to discuss.[37] Northern Lights, was published in 1995 (entitled The Golden Compass in the U.S., 1996). Pullman won both the annual Carnegie Medal[6] and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a similar award that authors may not win twice.[17][a] He was awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours list in 2004. In 2004, he was elected President of the Blake Society.[38]
Presidency of Society of Authors[edit]
In 2013, Pullman was elected President of the Society of Authors – the "ultimate honour" awarded by the British writers' body, and a position first held by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.[115] In January 2016, Pullman resigned as patron of the Oxford Literary Festival in support of the Society of Author's campaign for writers to be paid fees at festivals and drew attention to the poor remuneration of writers.[64]
On 10 August 2021 Pullman tweeted a response to what he wrongly thought was criticism of Kate Clanchy's teaching memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. His tweet said that those who condemn a book without reading it would be at home with "Boko Haram and the Taliban." Pullman later deleted the tweet and apologised. On the 11th of August The Society of Authors put out a statement and an interview with Chair of Management Committee Joanne Harris which were described by The Guardian as the society "distancing" itself from Pullman.[65] Pullman resigned his presidency, later stating that the management committee urging him to apologise for something he hadn’t done had been a factor in his decision to stand down.[66] He later criticised Harris for her "facetious and flippant" public comments and stated that the Society of Authors had become a "vehicle for gesture politics" and called for external review and reform of the organisation.[116][117][118][119]