Philip Pullman

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-06

Philip Pullman was born October 19, 1946, in Norwich, England. His father, an RAF pilot, died in a 1954 plane crash in Kenya when Pullman was seven; his mother remarried the following year and the family moved to North Wales. He read English at Exeter College, Oxford, from 1965 to 1968, earning a Third Class BA, and later taught children aged nine to thirteen at Bishop Kirk Middle School in Oxford while writing school plays, before teaching part-time at Westminster College, Oxford, from 1988 to 1996. He began writing full-time in 1996. He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000), comprising Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, which he later extended with The Book of Dust trilogy (2017-2025). He also wrote the Sally Lockhart quartet (1985-1994) and the controversial novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010). His honors include the Carnegie Medal in 1995, later named 'Carnegie of Carnegies,' the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, the Whitbread Award in 2000, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2005; he was made a CBE in 2004 and knighted in 2019.