Philip Pullman
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2002
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Philip Pullman is the author of the celebrated His Dark Materials trilogy: Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. He was born in Norwich and spent his early years travelling all over the world with his father, who was in the RAF, and his mother and brother. Whilst in Australia he devoured comic book stories, which made a big contrast to the traditional stories his clergyman grandfather would tell him on return trips to Norwich. Philip planned to be a writer from the age of six and, when the family moved to Wales when he was 11, he developed a real passion for stories, encouraged by a school teacher to read more and write them down. Philip went to study English at Oxford, although he says it was really after he finished his degree that he started to learn. He began his first novel the day he left and although he says "it was terrible" he didn't give up. He worked in a variety of jobs to enable him to write and eventually went into teaching. He developed his writing style further by writing school plays and dealing with the challenge of making them accessible to both the children and the parents: it was an ideal training ground.
Philip has since written many books for children: Clockwork, I was a Rat! (which was dramatised for BBC television), and The Firework-Maker's Daughter, which won the Smarties Gold Award in 1996 and the Sally Lockhart Award. The His Dark Materials trilogy has become a huge success with children and adults, and, on 22nd January 2002, Philip won the Whitbread Prize for the third book in the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. This was the first time that a children's book had won either the Booker or the Whitbread.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Sonata Reminiscenza in A Minor by Nickolay Medtner Book: A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust Luxury: A Jar of Apricots, by Chardin
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kresti Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer from the seclusion of his garden shed in Oxford, he's poured out stories to delight the world. |
| 0:37.0 | His main audience has been children, but people of all ages and nations are now attracted by his work. He made his reputation with his books |
| 0:44.7 | about Sally Lockhart, an unmarried mother and sleuth in DeKensian London, but it's |
| 0:49.4 | his trilogy, His Dark Materials, which has put him top of his profession which is airborne |
| 0:54.6 | jellyfish gay angels and armored bears are some of the creatures which inhabit |
| 0:59.1 | these prize-winning books loved by critics and millions of readers but described by the Catholic Herald |
| 1:04.8 | as worthy of the bonfire. After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are |
| 1:10.0 | the thing we need most in the world he says and I am always the servant of the |
| 1:14.4 | story that's chosen me to tell it. He is Philip Pullman. We'll come to the |
| 1:19.0 | church's argument with you later on Philip, but tell me about being chosen by the story. It sounds rather |
| 1:24.3 | mystical. You're not the first author to say it. How does it work for you? It does |
| 1:29.3 | sound rather, if not mystical, then somehow platonic, as if the stories inhabit a different realm and they come to me. |
| 1:35.0 | I don't really believe that but it certainly feels like that. |
| 1:38.0 | It feels as if a story comes to me and says, tell me this is your job your job this is what you got to do. |
| 1:43.2 | But how does it come? It's just sort of plunk down in front of you and say... |
| 1:46.0 | No what happens is something snags your mind and you think oh there's a story there |
| 1:50.0 | what can I do about that and then little by little little it sort of emerges out of the fog of unknowing. |
| 1:55.6 | So the talent is in the recognition, is it? Because I mean there must be lots of bits and pieces |
| 1:59.3 | that might happen past you any day of the week. |
| 2:02.8 | I think that everybody has these things all the time, but only people who write professionally |
... |
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