Sir Terence David John Pratchett Was and excellent British writer born 28th of April 1948 in town of Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire.
Pratchett as a child always wanted to be an astronomer, he even owned a telescope, but due to his lack of mathematical skill he was not able
to achieve this dream. As a small child he was collecting cards of planets and in his adult life he had a backyard observatory. In his
honour NASA named an asteroid after him - '127005 Pratchett'.
Instead of focusing of astronomy, he started focusing on
literature, reading mostly Science Fiction books by both American and British authors. He claims, that his 'true' education of literature
and the literary world comes from reading the authors H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. He earned five O-levels and started A-level courses in Art, English and
History. At his 13 years his first story was called The Hades Business published in a school magazine and two years later was
published commercially.
After not succeeding in astronomy his next career of choice was journalism. He worked with Bucks Free Press where
he wrote stories under the pseudonym 'Uncle Jim'. His career as an author started when he met with a director of a small publishing
company, which published his first book 'The Carpet People' in 1971. Subsequently he published two more books called 'The Dark
Side of the Sun' (1976) and 'Strata' (1981).
He's most famous for his book series Discworld for which he published 41 novels. The first book of the
series was 'The Color of Magic' (1983). In 1987 Terry Pratchett left his job at the Central Electricity Generating board to
work full-time on the Discworld
series. According to a survey done by the Bookselller's Pocket Yearbook 2005 he was second place in book sales, just beaten by J. K. Rowling. His Discworld series books have sold 40 million copies
all around the world in 36 different languages.
In 2007 he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, but that didn't stop him from making
books, just instead of writing them manually he used a speech recognition software and published books the same pace as he did before the
diagnosis. In 2015 he died peacefully at home in Witshire, after he finished his final Discworld novel 'The Sheperd's Crown' which was published
posthumonously. His daughter Rhianna
Pratchett a video game writer is involved in filming of Terry Pratchett's works.
