Philip Pullman

British · born 1946

Born Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman on October 19, 1946, in Norwich, he was the son of an RAF pilot, Alfred Pullman, who died in a plane crash in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising when Pullman was seven. His mother remarried another flier, and the family followed his stepfather to Rhodesia, Australia, and finally North Wales, where Pullman attended Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech. A grandfather who was a Norfolk clergyman gave him a love of storytelling; Milton, Blake, and the Iliad gave him the rest. He read English at Exeter College, Oxford, took a third in 1968, and spent the next decade teaching middle-school children in Oxford, retelling Homer to them in the classroom. His first novels were Victorian-flavoured adventures, beginning with The Ruby in the Smoke (1985), built around the East End orphan Sally Lockhart. The first volume of His Dark Materials, Northern Lights, appeared in 1995 in the United Kingdom, in the United States as The Golden Compass, set in a parallel England where every human soul walks beside its owner in the shape of an animal called a daemon. It won the Carnegie Medal and later the Carnegie of Carnegies as the finest of the prize's seventy-year history. The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000), the first children's book ever to win the Whitbread Award outright, completed a trilogy that took on Milton's God and offered in his place a republic of conscience. The companion sequence The Book of Dust appeared between 2017 and 2025. He was knighted in 2019. He lives outside Oxford with his wife Judith, in a working farmhouse where he writes longhand at a window overlooking the garden.