Filip Pulman

Philip Pullman is an English writer.

He was born in 1946 into a military family. His father was a pilot in the Royal Air Force and served abroad. In childhood, the imagination of little Philip was fed by numerous journeys with his parents around the world. “We were like tumbleweed,” the writer recalls. He spent his childhood in southern Africa and Australia. It seems that sailing the seas and oceans helped develop his literary imagination: hence such epic scope and a broad vision of the world.

When he grew up, Philip Pullman settled in New South Wales and studied English at Oxford. Later he worked as a librarian, and then, after receiving the appropriate training, became a schoolteacher — he taught a range of subjects at his beloved Oxford in a secondary school. He is a born storyteller and a good teacher; children adored it when he read them the Iliad. His idols are Homer, Swift, and Dickens. He was inspired to create his finest work, His Dark Materials, by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he has spoken about repeatedly in interviews.

Pullman writes all his books in the third person and prefers to work on a book in the garden of his home according to a fixed routine: every day he writes an average of 1,100 words (three pages), always by hand with a ballpoint pen in a specially lined notebook, and he comes up with the first sentence the night before so as not to begin the morning with a blank page. As his dæmon, the author would like to see a dolphin for intelligence or a magpie for agility.

Pullman became famous for the children’s detective series about sixteen-year-old Sally Lockhart, set in nineteenth-century London: The Ruby in the Smoke (1985), The Shadow in the North (1988), The Tiger in the Well (1990), and The Tin Princess (1994).

In 1996, Pullman’s novel Northern Lights (published in the United States as The Golden Compass) appeared, marking the beginning of the famous trilogy His Dark Materials, whose title is taken from John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost. It was followed by The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000). The trilogy is supplemented by short stories — Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North. The first