Philip Pullman
The multi award-winning His Dark Materials author reveals his new book, a re-telling of the life of Christ.
You will probably have encountered Philip Pullman via his Dark Materials trilogy which spectacularly re-visioned Milton’s Paradise Lost, complete with witches, daemons, polar bears and zeppelins. But if you thought Pullman was just about fairytales for the post-Potter generation, think again: his latest book, a re-telling of the life of Jesus, has caused something of a stir since its’ recent publication...
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Philip Pullman was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before his family settled in North Wales. He went to Oxford to read English, becoming a teacher (a background which he has observed “leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools”) and then a lecturer at Westminster College, Oxford, from 1988 to 1996. He began writing whilst teaching, and while his books are generally of the sort that can be read by children or young adults, he is on record as saying that he is happy that his work appeals to a mixed audience: “mixed in age, that is, though the more mixed in every other way as well, the better.”
His first published work was The Haunted Storm, which joint-won the New English Library's Young Writer's Award in 1972. Galatea, an adult fantasy-fiction novel, followed in 1978, but it was his school plays which inspired his first children's book, Count Karlstein, in 1982 (the book was republished in 2002). The Ruby in the Smoke, the first in a quartet of books featuring a young Victorian adventurer, Sally Lockhart, followed in 1986. He has also written a number of shorter stories which, in his words, “for want of a better term, I call fairy tales”. They include The Firework-Maker's Daughter, I Was a Rat!, and Clockwork, or All Wound Up.
It is his His Dark Materials trilogy however that Pullman is probably most well-known. Beginning with Northern Lights (re-titled The Golden Compass for American audiences) in 1995, the blockbusting trilogy continued with The Subtle Knife in 1997, and concluded with The Amber Spyglass in 2000. Pullman was awarded a number of prizes for these books, including the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children's Book Award, and (for The Amber Spyglass) the Whitbread Book of the Year Award - the first time in the history of that prize that it was given to a children's book.
In 2008, Pullman continued work on two further books: The Adventures of John Blake, a story for the children’s comic The DFC, and The Book of Dust, a sequel to the His Dark Materials trilogy, a book that he tantalisingly notes that he can tell readers nothing about, “except that it’s by far the most important thing I’m doing, and I intend to do it as well as I possibly can”.
Pullman also frequently crops up in the news of the day for his unabashed criticism of a selection of institutions, from articles in The Times criticising the Labour government’s invasion of British civil liberties to leading revolts against the introduction of age guidance for children's books. It remains to be seen how a man perpetually labelled by the press as ‘one of Britain's most famous atheists’ will be received when re-telling the life of Jesus, but we’re pretty sure it’ll be a great read.
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
This is a story. In this ingenious and spell-binding retelling of the life of Jesus, Philip Pullman revisits the most influential story ever told. Charged with mystery, compassion and enormous power, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ throws fresh light on who Jesus was and asks the reader questions that will continue to resonate long after the final page is turned. For, above all, this book is about how stories become stories. Part novel, part history, part fairytale, The Good Man Jesus offers a radical new take on the myths and the mysteries of the Gospels, and the genesis of church that has so shaped the course of the last two millennia.
Read more about The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, including a free downloadable extract at Lovereading.com
