What makes philip pullman a significant author

How can we be good? Do we have to be good? Those are big, important questions. And the Christian religion did give answers, which worked for most of years and still do work for people. All that demonstrates is that people need stories. A story will help us make sense of anything. But a story is a story. Do we need to build it? Or has it built itself? Do we need a system to live by? Can we build our own? What would it be like to try and live without one? The Gaia hypothesis taps into the same feeling.

You have this mysterious substance called Dust, which is somehow connected to consciousness. I know this is part of the mystery of your story, but can you tell us more about Dust?

PP: Yeah, I'll try. There's a Higgs field which permeates everything, and this is the particle associated with that field. That's why this teacup weighs something when I pick it up. And that's why things stay on the shelf and don't float away because they have mass. The Higgs field and the Higgs particle were a good model for how Dust works. But we're going to see more of that in the third book. SP: Why is everything about Dust so secretive? And why does the Magisterium want to control it?

PP: In just the same way that the Catholic Inquisition of the 17th century persecuted Galileo, who brought new ideas like the sun being at the center of the universe.

The Church persecuted them because they seemed to contradict what the Bible said. And the Church, being in control of everything, wanted to command people's thoughts as well as what they did. They were very fierce and severe in defending this knowledge that we now know to be untrue. So the Magisterium in my book is doing the same sort of thing with this idea of Dust, which seems to be connected with the change in consciousness that comes to us in adolescence, with the awakening of sexuality, with the change in William Blake's terms "from innocence to experience.

These are all tied up together, and because they involve this notion of sin and because it goes back to the story in the Book of Genesis that Adam and Eve sinned by eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. It was discovering the knowledge of good and evil which marked them out. They were innocent no more, and they had to leave paradise. I refer to that story in "His Dark Materials. SP: Of course, this moment is traditionally seen as the fall from grace.

But you're saying eating the apple was when they discovered self-consciousness. PP: That's correct. I can see why people would think it was heretical, but I have never understood why a God who invented us would not want us to know about things, and would tempt us with the knowledge of something and then forbid us to enjoy it.

That seems crazy to me. It's got a very good cast. The script is very good. It's skillfully taking the story from the first book and making it into a series of eight single episodes. You've got to be very craftsman-like with this sort of thing. The writer Jack Thorne is a master at adjusting the pace of the story to fit exactly into the demands of a single episode.

PP: I was sort of slightly involved. My name is there as an executive producer. I didn't get a chair with my name on it, which I was rather sorry about, but apart from that, I have been involved mainly in commenting on what's been done so far and making a few suggestions.

But I haven't tinkered with the main thrust of the story or the characters at all. Author, playwright, scriptwriter, and educator. Teacher at Ivanhoe, Bishop Kirk, and Marston middle schools,. Oxford, England, ; writer, —. Knopf New York, NY , Knopf, Saelig Gallagher, Arthur A. Ancient Civilizations nonfiction , illustrated by G.

Long, Wheaton Exeter, England , Pullman is also the author of scripts for television. The first three books in the "His Dark Materials" series have been optioned by New Line Cinema for production as motion pictures. The English bestow two prestigious literary prizes every year: the Whitbread Award and the Booker Prize. In , Philip Pullman won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for The Amber Spyglass , an unprecedented accolade for someone who is seen primarily as a writer for younger readers.

Never before had the Whitbread Book of the Year been awarded to a young adult novel, or any children's book for that matter—in fact, the Whitbread has a category for children's literature, and The Amber Spyglass won that award too.

Drawing its energy from myth, science fiction, classical literature, the Bible, and speculative philosophy, Pullman's trilogy succeeds for children as a ripping good-versus-evil adventure, and for teens and adults as a thoughtful venture into alternative realities. Considered a writer of great range, depth, and imagination, Pullman is recognized as one of the most talented creators of children's literature to have entered the field in the last quarter century.

The author of fiction, nonfiction, and picture books as well as a playwright and reteller, he is best known for writing fantasy and historical fiction for young adults, and historical fiction and fantasy for primary and middle graders. Pullman is lauded as a gifted storyteller who adds a distinctive, original touch to such literary forms as the mystery, the thriller, the horror story, and the problem novel.

As a writer of historical fiction, he usually sets his books in Victorian England, a period that he is credited for recreating with accuracy. His works are often praised for their meticulous research, and he uses prior eras or fantasy worlds to treat themes with strong parallels to contemporary society such as feminism, prejudice, and adjustment to new technology.

Pullman is known as the creator of four books about Sally Lockhart, a brave and independent young woman who solves mysteries in nineteenth-century London. Filled with underworld atmosphere, larger-than-life characters, and cliff-hanging suspense as well as thoughtful, provocative themes, these works have inspired Pullman's comparison to classic novelists such as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. The author is far more famous, however, as the creator of the "His Dark Materials" series, the bestselling epic tales set in an Arctic-like region that revolve around the concept of daemons, animal familiars that contain the souls of their human counterparts, and the quest of Lyra Belacqua, a feisty, shrewd teenager, to find the origin of Dust, a mysterious substance integral to the composition of the universe.

Called "science fantasies" by their author in an interview in Publishers Weekly , these novels are regarded as extraordinary works that combine exciting adventures with thought-provoking philosophical content. Although many of Pullman's books are considered sophisticated and demanding, most reviewers note their accessibility while acknowledging the author's ability to explore moral and ethical issues in riveting stories. Chris Routh of School Librarian commented that Pullman "has already confirmed his status as one of today's top storytellers," while Anne E.

Deifendeifer, writing in Children's Books and Their Creators , noted, "At their best, Pullman's novels, daring and inventive, are page turners that immediately hook readers into the story and often introduce them to the Victorian age. At the age of six, he went to live in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where his father was sent on assignment.

He remembered, "I loved that smell so much that when years and years later I happened to smell it unexpectedly in a street market in London, where someone was roasting mealies to sell, I found tears springing to my eyes.

His grandfather, a clergyman in the Church of England, was rector of the church there. There was no one stronger than he was, or wiser, or kinder…. When I was young he was the sun at the centre of my life. After his father was killed on a mission in Africa, Pullman and his younger brother went to live in Norfolk while their mother went to London to look for work.

Shortly thereafter, Pullman's mother received a letter saying that her husband was to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross, an award that was presented to the family by Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. Later, Pullman discovered that his father, who had incurred gambling debts and was involved in extramarital affairs, was suspected of committing suicide by crashing his plane.

Pullman wrote, "Sometimes I think he's really alive somewhere, in hiding, with a different name. I'd love to meet him. When Pullman was nine, his mother married an airman friend of her late husband's. When his stepfather was sent to Australia on assignment, the family went with him. Pullman made a spectacular discovery in Australia—comic books.

I'd been a reader for a long time, but a reader of books; I'd never known comics. When I got this one, I devoured it and demanded more. I adored them. Those poorly printed stories on their cheap yellowing news-print intoxicated me, enthralled me, made me dizzy with passion.

It was the first stirring of the storytelling impulse. I couldn't have put it like this, but what I wanted was to take characters, a setting, words, and pictures and weave a pattern out of them; not be Batman, but write about him. In Australia, Pullman began telling ghost stories to his school friends and to his brother in their bedroom at night.

The author recalled, "I don't know whether he enjoyed it, or whether he even listened, but it wasn't for his benefit; it was for mine. We had to do these exams called A Levels, which are taken in the two years before you go to university. So we read aloud the first two books—the best two books, really. The landscape of Hell, the revolution of the devils to make war on God. That actually had a physical effect on me; my skin bristled and my heart beat faster. It is actually a magic spell.

It changes things; it changes you. I know a lot of poetry by heart. It was also the Beat poets. I found that for myself, and I loved it. And I did write a lot of poetry. All the way through Oxford I thought I was going to be a poet, but then I turned to narrative, to fiction, instead. And you turned specifically, after some time, to fantasy.

And when did that turn arrive? I can date it exactly, It turned out that David had been to school a little later than me but that he had done the same books. By the time the lunch was finished, I had a contract to write a fantasy.

What I found with fantasy was a way of saying something about being human. The world of J. Tolkien is a world without sexuality in it. Blah blah blah. No nourishment in it. So to find myself writing a fantasy was a bit of a surprise.

But I thought of it as realism. I wanted to make the characters as real as I could make them. There was a lot of religious opposition to it, whipped up by a body called the Catholic League, among other people. And I think the studio just got nervous. There was no need for them to get nervous, but they did. It was very well done at the stage of the National Theatre, about fifteen years ago. And under the number of the hymn, printed in small italics, was usually the name of the author.

In this case, the name there was Lyra Davidica. And not-so-little Lyras, now. It was bought by somebody who wanted me to name a character after his father-in-law, whose name was Bud Schlesinger. I wondered where Bud Schlesinger came from. Anyway, the same thing happened with the Grenfell Tower auction.

A teacher wanted to raise some money in memory of a pupil of his who was sixteen years old. She was called Nur Huda el-Wahabi, and he started a crowdfunding thing, and they raised quite a lot of money. In this book, Lyra goes to the Middle East, or to a part of her world that resembles it, and I was wondering if that particular name influenced that narrative element.

She was always going to go through the Middle East, toward Central Asia. But, of course, with the world being the way it is, we do have boats laden with refugees that are shipwrecked. And we do have people being exiled from their homeland.

Books have been pulled by publishers for suspicion of causing offense. In one recent case, a writer pulled her own book and then decided that she made the wrong decision.

You have characters in your books who come from very different backgrounds and races or ethnicities than yours. What do you make of this question of appropriation? It is a very interesting and very difficult question. There are two perfectly valid ways of looking at it. One is that people should be free to tell their own stories—not only free but encouraged and rewarded for telling their own stories.