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Book Cover for: Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes: The Official Biography, Rob Wilkins

Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes: The Official Biography

Rob Wilkins

Winner:Hugo Award -Related Book (2023)
'People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.'

Terry Pratchett, creator of the phenomenally bestselling Discworld series, knight of the realm, and holder of more honorary doctorates than he knew what to do with, was known and loved around the world for his wildly popular books, his brilliant satirical humor, and for the humanity of his campaign work. But that's only part of the picture.

At the time of his death in 2015, he was working on his finest story yet--his own. The story of a boy who was told by his headteacher aged six that he would never amount to anything, and spent the rest of his life proving him wrong. Who walked out on his A levels to become a journalist, encountering some very dead bodies and the idea for his first novel before he reached twenty. Who celebrated his knighthood by smelting himself a sword, and who, on being awarded the prestigious Carnegie Medal, switched it during the prizegiving for a chocolate replica and proceeded to eat it in front of an audience of horrified librarians.

Tragically, Terry ran out of time to complete the memoir he so desperately wanted to write. But now, in the only authorized biography of one of our best known and best loved writers, his manager and friend Rob Wilkins picks up where Terry left off, and with the help of friends, family, and Terry's own unpublished work, tells the full story of an extraordinary life.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Transworld Publishers
  • Publish Date: Nov 7th, 2023
  • Pages: 400
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.70in - 5.00in - 1.40in - 0.85lb
  • EAN: 9781529176902
  • Categories: Literary FiguresScience Fiction & FantasyEnglish, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

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About the Author

Rob Wilkins worked with Terry Pratchett for more than twenty years, first as his personal assistant and later as his business manager. He now manages the Pratchett literary estate and Terry's production company, Narrativia.

Praise for this book

Always readable, illuminating and honest. It made me miss the real Terry.--Neil Gaiman

Heart breaking and funny . . . sometimes joyfully, sometimes painfully, intimate . . . it is wonderful to have this closeup picture of the writer's working life. --Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Observer

The joy of this biography . . . is that it spins magic from mundanity in precisely the way Pratchett himself did.--The Telegraph

No one, after Pratchett's wife, Lyn, and daughter, Rhianna, knew the author as well as Wilkins. I wept through the last 20 pages - beautifully done - charting Pratchett's decline in a way that is both sensitive and unsparing.--The Times

Fond, funny and conveys a pitch-perfect sense of how Pratchett managed to take the elements of his 1950s working-class childhood . . . and turn it into a universe of limitless richness and invention.--Mail on Sunday