Terry Pratchett
April 28, 1948 – March 12, 2015
Sir Terence David John Pratchett, OBE was a British fantasy writer. His best-known works are his Discworld novels, which have been translated into 37 languages. Around 85 million of his books have been sold worldwide.
Terry Pratchett published his first work at the age of 13. It was the short story The Hades Business, which was first published in the school newspaper and later in Science Fantasy Magazine. After leaving school in 1965, Pratchett began training as a journalist at a local newspaper in the same year. During his work as a journalist, he mentioned in an interview with Peter Bander van Duren, the head of a small publishing house, that he had also written a novel: The Carpet Peoples.
Pratchett had been married to Lyn Marian Purves since 1968; her daughter Rhianna (born 1976) is also an author.
In 1980, Pratchett became press spokesman for the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). The CEGB was a state-owned company in Great Britain that regulated the distribution of electricity production between different generation methods. When it became clear that he could make a living from his books, Pratchett ended his work at the CEGB in 1987 and published about two novels a year from then on. In 2003, he was the most successful author in Great Britain after Joanne K. Rowling.
In 1998, Pratchett was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). On 18 February 2009, he was made a Knight Bachelor by the Queen for his services to literature and has since been allowed to call himself Sir Terry Pratchett. On 28 April 2010, he was awarded his own coat of arms by the Clarenceux King of Arms. Among other things, it features an ankh and a Morpørk owl, which are taken from the coat of arms of the city of Ankh-Morpork, which he invented, the setting for many of his works, and the motto "Noli timere Messorem" ("Don't Fear the Grim Reaper", an allusion to the song (Don't Fear) The Reaper by Blue Öyster Cult and to the sympathetic nature of the character "Death", which plays a major role in many Discworld novels). In 2004 he received the Locus Award for the first time, in 2011 the Karl Edward Wagner Award and the Margaret A. Edwards Award of the American Library Association for great service to young adult literature.
In December 2007, Pratchett announced that he had been diagnosed with a very rare, early-onset form of Alzheimer's disease. Pratchett spoke about the disease on 13 March 2008 in an interview on the BBC radio programme Today Programme. According to his own statement, he had surrendered his driver's license and had difficulties typing, which is why he has since written his texts with the help of speech recognition software. Pratchett donated one million dollars to the Alzheimer's Research Trust and criticized that too little funding is being allocated to dementia research. "I would eat the butt of a dead mole if it helped me," he said. In this context, he also spoke out in favour of euthanasia. Pratchett led a campaign against the ban on euthanasia in Great Britain. He has produced a BBC documentary in which he accompanies two people to Switzerland when they commit suicide. Neil Gaiman told during a lecture that Pratchett had pills stored in his safe for a suicide, so that in case of doubt he could have decided for himself when he would die.
Pratchett died on 12 March 2015 at the age of 66 at his estate in Broad Chalke in the county of Wiltshire as a result of posterior cortical atrophy (PKA, also known as Benson syndrome), a neurodegenerative disease very similar to Alzheimer's disease. One of his fans reacted to the news of his death with a petition to Change.org demanding that death be returned to Terry Pratchett. Within two days, it was signed by over 25,000 fans. Operators of various Internet servers add additional header lines to the outgoing data of their servers in memory of Pratchett – and in reference to a form of commemoration depicted in Ab die Post.