Sir Terry Pratchett: Obituary

Not many people can expect the Facebook post announcing their untimely death to reach 23.1 million people within 24 hours, but then very few influence the lives of so many others as powerfully and as viscerally as Terry Pratchett did.

Following the news that Alzheimer’ s took Terry after seven years into the arms of one of his greatest creations, Death, the outpouring of grief from both his readers and his many friends across the book trade has been quite overwhelming. A life cut too short. Too many books left unwritten.

Why such a response of deep appreciation and such a strong sense of robbery? Because Terry had an imagination of rare power. He was insatiably curious about the human condition. His books were brimful of an intellect sharpened by his own infectious love of reading. And, perhaps above all, because he created characters readers took to their hearts and because everything he wrote was infused with such warmth and great humour.

In 1986, after we had sold around 35,000 copies of The Colour of Magic in Corgi paperback and were just about to release The Light Fantastic, Terry was still working as press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board, a position he was keen to leave. (As Terry wrote in Wyrd Sisters: “Only in our dreams are we free: the rest of the time we need wages.”) In a speech at the Transworld sales conference that year, Terry memorably said: “Thank you for the copies you’ ve sold so far. Maybe, maybe, if you carry on selling them at this rate, I’ ll be able to give up the day job.” The following year he did just that, and never looked back. Within a decade he was Britain’ s bestselling author, repeatedly topping the charts in both hardback and paperback.

Feeling sociable

His output was prodigious, writing two books a year for most of the next 20 years. Travelling the length and breadth of the UK to promote each one with a vigour and an enthusiasm matched by very few, Terry undertook two four-week tours every year, visiting a mix of independent and chain bookstores, while always reserving a space for the science fiction and fantasy specialists who had been his earliest supporters—Andromeda in Birmingham and Forbidden Planet in London.

Terry recognised in every reader the fan he once was, clutching his books and attending SF conventions to meet his heroes. His fans were his main priority; he always took the time to meet every one and hear their every story. During those tours he would sign copies—and importantly talk to his readers—for between eight and nine hours a day. At the end of each, Terry would provide his publishers with illuminating and often hilarious reports (see boxout).

Though he left school without A-Levels—he used to cite his major source of education as Beaconsfield Public Library—over his lifetime, Terry amassed 10 honorary doctorates from some of the UK’ s most eminent universities as well as one from Trinity College, Dublin. Terry was chair of the Society of Authors in 1994 and 1995, was appointed an OBE in 1998 and knighted for his services to literature in 2009—to celebrate, he forged his own sword out of iron collected from the fields around his home in Wiltshire, where he lived with his wife Lyn.

In recent years, Terry became as well known for his campaigning as for Discworld, championing the causes of orangutan conservation, Alzheimer’ s research and Dignity in Dying.

On 12th March, Terry’ s story finally came to an end, leaving Lyn, their daughter Rhianna, and millions of fans around the world bereft. But what a legacy . . . and he has left us with so many happy memories.

Larry Finlay is managing director of Transworld Publishers