Take the bumbling wizard Rincewind, whose name comes from “By the Way,” a humorous newspaper column that ran in The Daily Express from 1919 to 1975. Granny Weatherwax, for example, shares her last name with Rudd Weatherwax, who trained several of the Lassie dogs that appeared in various films and television shows.īut not all of Pratchett’s characters were named after real people. “A lot of what people think of as weird names in my books are real names,” he told an interviewer in 2011. Many Discworld inhabitants go by peculiar names (just ask Moist von Lipwig or Carrot Ironfoundersson), but many of them don't come from thin air. RINCEWIND’S NAME WAS LIFTED FROM A NEWSPAPER COLUMN. Following their success, he resigned from his CEGB post to write full-time. (It was no easy task the CEGB hired him just a few months after the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania.) On the side, Pratchett wrote and published the first four Discworld novels: The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, and Mort. In 1980, Pratchett left the Bucks Free Press to take a job as a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), where his responsibilities mainly involved reassuring the public about the safety of this organization’s nuclear power plants. PRATCHETT WROTE THE FIRST FOUR INSTALLMENTS WHILE WORKING AS A SPOKESMAN FOR NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS. Here are 10 things they won’t teach you at Unseen University. Set on a magical, disc-shaped world supported by four elephants who in turn ride atop a gigantic turtle, these masterworks of comic fantasy have collectively sold more than 80 million copies worldwide.

His debut novel, The Carpet People-a slightly-altered version of a fantasy serial Pratchett wrote while working at his local paper, the Bucks Free Press-was published in 1971, followed by the bestselling Discworld series. Pratchett, who was born in Buckinghamshire on April 28, 1948, wrote or co-wrote more than 70 books during his lifetime.

Just two writers had five works that cracked the top 100: Charles Dickens and the late Sir Terry Pratchett. In 2003, the BBC asked 140,000 Britons to come up with the nation’s top 100 novels.

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