Terry Pratchett left school at seventeen for a job on the Bucks Free Press, spent years as a press officer for the electricity board, and wrote in the evenings until the writing paid better than the day job. In 1983 The Colour of Magic introduced a flat world carried on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle, and the joke became a life’s work: forty-one Discworld novels, and for most of the 1990s the title of Britain’s bestselling author.
The parody hardened into something better. His later books are about policing, journalism, banking, religion and prejudice, argued through characters as durable as Sam Vimes, Granny Weatherwax and Death, who speaks in capital letters and is the kindest figure in the sequence.
He was knighted in 2009, diagnosed with a rare early-onset form of Alzheimer’s in 2007, and campaigned fiercely about dementia and about dying well until his death in 2015. He remains, by some distance, the most quoted comic novelist Britain has produced.
13 hours and 38 minutes
