![]() As a teenager, he wrote a fan-letter to Tolkien, who wrote back. The son of a mechanic and a secretary, Pratchett was born in 1948 in the Chilterns (a chalk landscape that haunts his books), in a house with no electricity or running water. What matters are the uncomfortable woollen socks his hero Sam Vimes wears, uncomplainingly, because his wife Sibyl knitted them. What matters, in Pratchett’s world, is what he called “headology” – the commonsensical psychology behind the petty acts of cruelty and kindness that comprise most human behaviour. It’s not even the jokes that matter, though few writers since Wodehouse have stuffed a page with so many. His Discworld novels may have taken place on a flat planet held aloft by four elephants and a turtle, but that’s not what matters in them. The joy of this biography by Rob Wilkins, Pratchett’s personal assistant from around 2000 onwards, is that it spins magic from mundanity in precisely the way Pratchett himself did. Like most authors, Terry Pratchett had a dull life.
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