Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman was born in Norwich in 1946, the son of an RAF pilot who died in a plane crash when Pullman was seven. His stepfather was also RAF, which meant a peripatetic childhood — Zimbabwe, Australia, England again. He read English at Exeter College, Oxford, then taught middle school in Oxford for twelve years, a period he credits with teaching him how to hold an audience. He began writing seriously in his thirties, publishing several novels before the work that would define his career.

Northern Lights (published in the US as The Golden Compass) appeared in 1995 and introduced Lyra Belacqua, an orphaned girl living in Jordan College, Oxford — a recognizable Oxford transposed into a world where every human has an animal daemon, an external physical manifestation of the soul. The novel sets up a conflict between Lyra and the Magisterium, the authoritarian religious institution that controls this world, over a mysterious particle called Dust and children who are being stolen for experimental procedures. The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000) expand the scope across multiple universes, drawing more explicitly on Milton's Paradise Lost — the trilogy is, among other things, a retelling of the Fall in which the Fall is a liberation.

The theological argument at the heart of His Dark Materials — that institutional religion is a machinery of control, that consciousness and experience are sacred rather than sinful, that "the republic of heaven" must be built in this world rather than awaited in another — made the books genuinely controversial. The Catholic League in the United States called for boycotts of the 2007 film adaptation, starring Nicole Kidman. Pullman did not soften his position. The Amber Spyglass became, in 2001, the first children's book to win the Whitbread Book of the Year, competing against the adult fiction nominees and beating them.

The Book of Dust trilogy — a prequel and sequel to His Dark Materials — began with La Belle Sauvage in 2017 and continued with The Secret Commonwealth in 2019. A third volume is forthcoming. These books are darker in tone and more explicitly political; The Secret Commonwealth is partly an allegory for the retreat from imagination in contemporary culture. Pullman has also written the Sally Lockhart mysteries, several fairy tale retellings, and Daemon Voices (2017), a collection of essays on storytelling that is among the best statements by any novelist on the craft.

The HBO/BBC television adaptation of His Dark Materials ran from 2019 to 2022, with Dafne Keen as Lyra and Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter. It is notably more faithful to Pullman's religious critique than the 2007 film, which was softened in production. Pullman has described his project as a direct counter to C.S. Lewis's Narnia — where Lewis saw the Fall as a catastrophe requiring divine redemption, Pullman sees it as the beginning of human consciousness and therefore the beginning of everything worth having. Whether or not one accepts the argument, it is a serious one, and it is unusual to find it made with this much narrative force in a book technically classified as young adult fiction. The trilogy is read by adults as much as children, and the adult reading is not a lesser one.