Philip Pullman Storyteller
Philip Pullman is the author of the award-winning and best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy. The three books follow the progress of a young girl named Lyra and her friend Will on their journey into unknown worlds. His Dark Materials is much more than an adventure story, it is about growing up, or innocence and experience, and it explores the major themes of truth, love and death.
Pullman himself spent a great deal of his childhood traveling abroad because both his father and stepfather were pilots in the Royal Air Force. As a child, he went on several long ocean voyages, and he lived in Africa and in Australia. “Before I was 11, I had been to eight different schools.”
“In Australia, I made a great discovery. TV had not reached Australia yet, but everyone listened to the radio. I remember listening to gangster serials, and cowboy serials, and best of all, Superman! When I first saw a Superman comic, it changed my life, I had been reading books for a long time but I had never known comics before. Soon afterward, I discovered Batman, too, whom I loved even more.”
Pullman started writing his first novel the day after he had finished his final exams at Oxford University. “I discovered after about an hour that it was much harder than I had expected. It still is! I found that the amount I could write comfortably every day was about three pages, so that is what I have done ever since.”
Before he became a full-time writer, Pullman had been teaching for many years. “What I enjoyed most in that difficult and valuable profession was telling stories, telling folk tales and ghost stories and Greek myths, over and over, until I knew them as well as I knew my own life.” He had always loved telling stories. As a schoolboy, he had entertained his friends by reading ghost stories to them or by making up his own.
One day he was delighted to get a letter that had arrived at his door even though the writer did not know his address. The envelope said “Philip Pullman, The Storyteller, Oxford”
“I could not ask for anything better,” he said.