Philip Pullman is an English author, born in 1946 in Norwich. The son of a Royal Air Force pilot, he spent parts of his childhood in Africa and Australia before settling in north Wales. He studied English at Exeter College, Oxford, and worked for many years as a schoolteacher, developing the storytelling gifts that would later make him one of Britain's most celebrated authors.
Pullman is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy, comprising Northern Lights (published as The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. Beginning as a children's fantasy about a girl named Lyra and her animal-shaped soul, or daemon, the series grows into an ambitious meditation on innocence, experience, free will, and organized religion, drawing on Milton's Paradise Lost.
The trilogy won numerous awards, including the Carnegie Medal and, for The Amber Spyglass, the Whitbread Book of the Year, the first children's book to win that overall prize. The story has been adapted for film, stage, and television. Pullman has continued the world in the companion trilogy The Book of Dust.
A prominent advocate for reading, storytelling, and secular humanism, Pullman is known for his willingness to engage young readers with profound philosophical and moral questions. He was knighted for services to literature and remains one of the most important and intellectually ambitious authors writing for young people.
