Philip Pullman
Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman is an English writer. He is best known for the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. The first volume, Northern Lights, won the Carnegie Medal and later the "Carnegie of Carnegies". The third volume, The Amber Spyglass, won the Whitbread Award. In 2017, he started a companion trilogy, The Book of Dust, of which the final novel, The Rose Field, was published in October 2025.
He was knighted in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to literature, and has been awarded several honorary doctorates and other honours.
Early life and education
Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman was born in Norwich.His grandfather was a Church of England rector, and gave him a love of storytelling. His father, Alfred Outram Pullman, a Royal Air Force pilot, was killed in a plane crash in Kenya in 1954, when Pullman was seven, and was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Pullman later said that, as a boy, he saw his father as "a hero, steeped in glamour, killed in action defending his country", and said he thought his father had been "training pilots". Pullman was then presented with a report from The London Gazette of 1954 which "said that the medal was given for 'gallant and distinguished service' during the Mau Mau uprising". Responding to that new information, Pullman wrote: "Given what we now know about British behaviour during the insurgency, my father probably doesn't come out of this with very much credit, judged by the standards of modern liberal progressive thought" and he accepted the revelation as "a serious challenge to his childhood memory".
His mother remarried the following year, to another RAF pilot, a friend of his father, whom Pullman liked, and they moved to North Wales. He remembers his mother reading him Just So Stories: "Kipling's rhythms must have got into my memory". His favorite childhood book was Erich Kästner's Emil and the Three Twins, "It was only much later that I realised why that book had such a deep effect on me: like mine, Emil's mother had been widowed, and he didn't want her to marry again". Pullman discovered comics, including Superman and Batman, and continues to enjoy the medium, citing Hergé's Adventures of Tintin as an influence.
He attended Taverham Hall School and Eaton House.
Around 1956, Pullman and his family spent around 18 months in South Australia, after his stepfather was posted to Woomera. He remembers seeing the largest flood ever recorded in South Australia, which he remembers vividly, later using it in the central plot line of the first volume in his second trilogy of novels, The Book of Dust, called La Belle Sauvage. He also remembers living in the Adelaide beachside suburb of Glenelg in 1956.
From 1957, was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech, Gwynedd, spending time in Norfolk with his grandfather, a clergyman. When he was 12 or 13, he heard older students reciting T. S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi", which was when he realised that poetry was going to be very important to him. Poetry taught him that words have "weight and colour and taste and shape as well as meaning." A few years later, Pullman discovered John Milton's Paradise Lost, which would become a major influence on His Dark Materials. He said that he discovered that poetry "had the power to stir a physical response: my heart beat faster, the hair on my head stirred, my skin bristled". Other influences include Homer, Virgil and Dante. At the age of 16, he discovered Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960, which "burst into my life... and changed the course of everything for me. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" was part of it; I had no idea poetry could do anything like that". Ginsberg led him to William Blake: "My mind and my body reacted to certain lines from the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell... I knew they were true in the way I knew that I was alive". Influenced by Bob Dylan, he wrote poems and songs, none of which were recorded.
From 1965, Pullman attended Exeter College, Oxford, receiving a Third Class BA in 1968. In an interview with The Oxford Student, he noted that he "did not really enjoy the English course", and that "I thought I was doing quite well until I came out with my third class degree and then I realised that I wasn't – it was the year they stopped giving fourth class degrees otherwise I'd have got one of those".
Pullman married Judith Speller in 1970 and they have two sons. At the time of his marriage he began teaching children aged 9 to 13 at Bishop Kirk Middle School in Summertown, North Oxford, where he also wrote school plays. He recalls retelling classics for his students, including The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Writing
His debut novel, The Haunted Storm was joint-winner of the New English Library's Young Writer's Award, but he refuses to discuss it. He followed it with Galatea, an adult fantasy. Kirkus Reviews wrote: "Pullman is not without ideas or talent; both shine often enough through this grandiose muddle to make one wonder what he'll do next." His school plays inspired his first children's book, Count Karlstein. He stopped teaching shortly after the publication of The Ruby in the Smoke, a Victorian mystery and the first book in the Sally Lockhart quartet, followed by The Shadow in the North, The Tiger in the Well and The Tin Princess. He collaborated with David Mostyn on Spring-Heeled Jack, a combination of graphic novel and text based on a penny dreadful character. Publishers Weekly wrote: "this waggish, innovative story of a courageous trio is sure to engage even the most reluctant reader." He wrote the realist novel The Broken Bridge, "a love letter to that landscape of North Wales."Between 1988 and 1996, Pullman taught part-time at Westminster College, Oxford, continuing to write children's stories. He began His Dark Materials in about 1993. The first book, Northern Lights, was published in 1995. While working on the trilogy, he wrote The Firework-Maker's Daughter, Clockwork, or All Wound Up and I Was a Rat! or, The Scarlet Slippers, which he called fairy tales. The Firework-Maker's Daughter won the Gold Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. The trilogy continued with The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.
Pullman has been writing full-time since 1996. He continues to deliver talks and writes occasionally for The Guardian, including writing and lecturing about education, in which he is often critical of unimaginative education policies. He was awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours list in 2004. That year, he was elected President of the Blake Society and guest-edited The Mays Literary Anthology, a collection of new writing from students at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He returned to fairy tales with The Scarecrow and His Servant, which won the Silver Smarties Prize.
In 2008, he started working on The Book of Dust, a companion trilogy to His Dark Materials, and "The Adventures of John Blake", a story for the British children's comic The DFC, with artist John Aggs.
In 2012, during a break from writing The Book of Dust, Pullman was asked by Penguin Classics to curate 50 of Grimms' classic fairytales, from their compendium of over 200 stories. "They are not all of the same quality", said Pullman. "Some are easily much better than others. And some are obvious classics. You can't do a selected Grimms' without Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella and so on." In 2017, a collection of his lectures and essays were published as Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling.
As of April 2025, the books in the two trilogies plus related short stories had sold more than 49 million copies in total.
''His Dark Materials''
His Dark Materials is a trilogy consisting of Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. The trilogy's title comes from Book II of Paradise Lost.Northern Lights takes place in a parallel universe where peoples' souls are embodied in animals called dæmons. Pullman was influenced by Socrates's daimon, described in Plato's Apology of Socrates. The trilogy centres around Lyra Belacqua, a girl initially growing up in Jordan College, Oxford. Northern Lights won both the annual Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a similar award that authors may not win twice. The Subtle Knife introduces Will Parry, a boy from our universe. The Amber Spyglass moves across several universes.
It was awarded both 2001 Whitbread Prize for best children's book and the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in January 2002, the first children's book so honoured. In 2003, it ranked third in the BBC's The Big Read, a poll of 200 top novels voted by the British public.
Pullman has written three companion pieces to the trilogy: Lyra's Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North and Serpentine.
Pullman has narrated unabridged audiobooks of the three novels in the His Dark Materials trilogy; with a full cast.
''The Book of Dust''
The Book of Dust includes characters and events from His Dark Materials. Pullman has said that the new series is neither sequel, nor prequel, but an "equel".La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of The Book of Dust, was published by Penguin Random House Children's and David Fickling in the UK and by Random House Children's in the US in 2017. A sequel, The Secret Commonwealth, was published in October 2019. It includes a character named after Nur Huda el-Wahabi, a 16-year-old victim of London's Grenfell Tower fire. As part of the charity auction Authors for Grenfell Tower, Pullman offered the highest bidder a chance to name a character in the upcoming trilogy. Ultimately, he raised £32,400. The third and final book in the trilogy, The Rose Field, was published on 23 October 2025.