Author Terry Pratchett knighted

Author Terry Pratchett has been named in the New Year Honours list and will receive a knighthood for his services to literature. The writer – who has sold more than 60 million books worldwide and has been translated into 37 languages - said he was still in  "total amazement”.

Pratchett told The Bookseller: "I really am in a very English way – you know beforehand so it’s not exactly a surprise when a whole load of journalists descend – just flabbergasted especially as I will now be married to a Lady after all these years." 

The writer, best known for this blockbusting fantasy drama series Discworld, added: "I’m very grateful and pleased on behalf of the genre because the fantasy genre lags behind the crime genre in, shall we say, appreciation."

In 1998, Pratchett was awarded an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to literature. He commented on how life has imitated art. The fictional character, Commander Vimes of the City Watch from his Discworld series is also knighted. 

Pratchett said: "He [Vimes] has been gradually elevated. It’s funny how reality copies [fiction]. He was made a knight and was completely puzzled as to what he should do with it."

However, Pratchett, added: "It [a knighthood] would be very nice to have I am sure. I will be able to look Jacqui Wilson in the face."

Children’s author Jacqueline Wilson was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the New Year Honours 2008. 

Pratchett announced a year ago that he was suffering from the onset of early Alzheimer’s disease but vowed to continue writing. He has since campaigned on Alzheimer issues and last month visited Downing Street to lobby Prime Minister Gordon Brown in person to increase funding for dementia research.  

Asked whether the knighthood might help him in this campaign work he said: "One imagines the ‘K’ on the name will help the Alzheimer society work but I have got it for services to literature – that’s what it says on the tin."

This year he donated half a million pounds to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust and became a patron of the charity.

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, said: "Terry promised to ’scream and harangue’ about dementia research. He did much more than that. He became a voice for the 700,000 people in the UK who live with dementia but cannot scream and harangue so loudly. Dementia research is still vastly under-funded, but this is changing thanks to Terry’s incredible work."

Terence David John Pratchett was born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, in April 1948. He passed his 11-plus but chose to go to the High Wycombe Technical High School rather than the local grammar because he thought "woodwork would be more fun than Latin".

His short story The Hades Business was published in the school magazine when he was 13 and was first published commercially two years later. After leaving school at the age of 17 he got a job as a reporter with the Bucks Free Press. In 1971 his first novel The Carpet People was published but Pratchett did not take up writing books full time until 1987.

He worked at the Western Daily Press and the Bath Chronicle before becoming a press officer in 1980 for the Central Electricity Generating Board, with responsibility for three nuclear power stations. 

His first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983 while the latest and 36th addition to the series, Making Money, was published in the UK in hardback by Doubleday in September 2007.