Sir Terry Pratchett

He was often reluctant to talk about Rowling’s work, but said that if JRR Tolkien had not written The Lord of the Rings, he could not have written the Discworld series: “It’s how a genre works,” he said. “Everyone makes their cake from the same ingredients.”

Born in what is now the largely well-to-do Buckinghamshire town of Beaconsfield in 1948, Terence David John Pratchett was an only child who grew up in a cottage with no running water or electricity. His father David was a mechanic and his mother Eileen worked as a secretary but was also a gifted storyteller. From an early age, Pratchett was interested in astronomy — he collected Brooke Bond tea cards about space and owned a telescope. His lack of mathematical skills, however, scuppered his dream of becoming an astronomer. What he did possess were the two key attributes of a writer: curiosity and imagination.

Walking home from school, his journey took him through a chalk pit. “When I learnt that chalk was made up of millions of tiny dead animals, it filled me with a deep sense of time,” he said. “This had been the bottom of the sea and I could practically hear the waves.”

He learnt to read later than most children but then made up for lost time, devouring dictionaries and thesauruses from beginning to end for pure enjoyment — “I think I was a rather weird kid, to be frank”. Yet after passing his 11-plus exam to win a place at the local grammar school, he chose instead to go to High Wycombe Technical High School because he felt “woodwork would be more fun than Latin”.

Nevertheless, it was books rather than bookcases that intrigued him. First he exhausted his grandmother’s collection of the short stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and HG Wells, before moving on to the more comprehensive choice at Beaconsfield public library. He fully utilised his Saturday job there by reading hundreds of books, with one in particular seizing his imagination: “It was Wind in the Willows that did it for me,” he said. “It’s an incredibly weird book. The sizes of the rat, the mole and the badger go up and down throughout. Toad can drive a car and all the animals can talk except the horse that pulls the caravan. And that’s what I fell in love with, that suspension of disbelief.”

He moved on to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. At 13 he went to a science-fiction convention, which encouraged him to write a fantasy story, The Hades Business, at school. It was awarded full marks by his teacher and published in the school magazine. And after bribing an aunt with a bunch of flowers to type it, young Pratchett sent the story to a sci-fi magazine. With his £14 payment, he bought a second-hand typewriter.

Soon he was earning a living as a writer, but not of fiction. He left school at 17 before completing his A-Level studies when a journalistic opportunity arose on the Bucks Free Press. During the first of two spells there, he married his wife, Lyn (née Purves). After he took a job on the Western Daily Press and moved to Somerset, the couple had a daughter, Rhianna, born in 1976.

Local journalism demystified writing, he said. “You get less excited about seeing your name in print. You don’t get scared of a sheet of paper . . . You are aware that you have readers.” In his early years as a journalist, Pratchett had written a novel for children, The Carpet People. He took the opportunity to mention it when, as a reporter, he interviewed a director of the Colin Smythe publishing firm. The company gave him an advance of £250 and The Carpet People was published in 1971, with a launch party in the carpet section of Heal’s department store on Tottenham Court Road.

Another book, The Dark Side of the Sun, was published in 1976, but there seemed little prospect of his genre of writing earning him a living. In 1980, soon after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, he became — “with impeccable timing” — a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), which required him to reassure the public constantly about the safety of nuclear power plants.

After a particularly stressful day of insisting that there was no reason to be concerned about a leak at the Hinkley Point nuclear power station in Somerset, he went home and spent hours at his typewriter. The result was one-third of a book and the surge of a creative flow that never ebbed. “Writing”, he said, “is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

The first of Pratchett’s Discworld novels, The Colour of Magic, was published by Corgi in 1983 and later serialised by the BBC’s Woman’s Hour. While he still had doubts about income, in 1987 Pratchett resigned from the CEGB after the success of his fourth Discworld book, Mort. He was given a £50,000 advance for six books, and would go on to set new records — simultaneously topping the hardcover and paperback lists (more than once) and also seeing his novels heading both the adult and children’s bestseller lists.

Pratchett insisted that he had “no social agenda”, but often drew parallels with the cultural and scientific topics of the day. He acknowledged that many of his books conveyed his satirical view of the world and had been “subtly influenced by moderately current affairs”. After all, “mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this,” he wrote in Pyramids. “You need to be a human being to be really stupid.”

He frequently employed what has been dubbed “stealth philosophy”, by hiding philosophical struggles, questions and arguments within his texts. Topics of satire included religion, Ingmar Bergman films, trade unions and the monarchy. In Equal Rites, he parodied gender stereotyping: “This is a story about magic and where it goes . . . It may, however, help to explain why Gandalf never got married and why Merlin was a man. Because this is also a story about sex, although probably not in the athletic, tumbling, count-the-legs-and-divide-by-two sense unless the characters get totally beyond the author’s control.”

The Hogfather inspired a £6 million television adaptation by Sky, starring David Jason. In the book Pratchett created an alternative version of Christmas, one that dealt with an idea close to his heart: “That it is our fantasies that make us real.”

He explained: “We start off believing things like the tooth fairy and Father Christmas and that educates us to believe in bigger fantasies like justice. You can grind down the whole universe into a powder and you will find no single atom of justice. Yet people will fight and die for the idea — it’s one of the nicer things about humanity.”

Pratchett’s primary interest had always been in writing for children. In 2002 he received the Carnegie Medal for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. Theorising about why he had not won other prestigious awards, he said his novels had tackled the nature of belief, politics and even journalistic freedom “but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer”.

He and his family moved, in 1993, to Broad Chalke near Salisbury, where they lived in a six-bedroom manor house. It had an outhouse for writing and a tennis court he never used. He was always upright and operational by 9am so that he could stop for a bowl of muesli at 10am and feel as though he was taking a break from work, rather than bemoaning not having started.

Whenever Pratchett ventured out from home, he was invariably dressed in black clothes and wearing a wide-brimmed hat, which he said was a Zen disguise: “If I take it off, I’m just another bald-headed, bearded man.” His style was always more urban cowboy than city gent.

He founded a television production company, Narrativia, which holds the rights to his works. Though Pratchett eschewed showbusiness engagements, he always found time for his legion of fans, whether on signing tours every May and November or to receive honorary degrees from several universities. His breaks from writing would usually be spent responding to readers’ letters — he and his agent, Colin Smythe, often received plot suggestions, proposals for books (and sometimes complaints when certain protagonists died). Sources at WH Smith said his novels were favourites even among shoplifters.

With his wealth and fame, he was able to indulge his interests: he enjoyed listening to Meatloaf while fussing over his tortoises and plants, and returned to his boyhood love of astronomy by building an observatory in his garden. He knew he had really made it when an asteroid was named after him — 127005 Pratchett. He also became increasingly involved in charity work, using his website to encourage support for the Orangutan Foundation UK, of which he was a trustee.

His books generated adaptations for the stage, radio and television, as well as computer games; Discworld maps and figurines filled toy shops. In 2013 his daughter, who survives him together with his wife, announced her plans to adapt his novel The Wee Free Men into a film. She is a scriptwriter and journalist who inherited her father’s love of video games (he counted Tomb Raider among his favourites).

It was always difficult to determine whether Pratchett was genuinely unruffled by being overlooked by the literary cognoscenti. If he was invited to a literary festival, he felt there was a subtext: “Well, of course I personally haven’t read your stuff but my gardener’s son is a real fan, so if you could come along without spitting on the floor we’d be grateful.” He never was short of deadpan wit. “I think I’m probably an atheist, but rather angry with God for not existing,” he mused.

Pratchett was diagnosed in 2007, aged 59, with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s disease but urged family, friends and fans to “keep things cheerful”. He made a substantial donation (estimated at £500,000) to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust and appeared in a two-part BBC documentary based on his illness (which he called an “embuggerance”).

In 2008 he met the prime minister, Gordon Brown, to ask for an increase in dementia research funding. “I am, along with many others, scrabbling to stay ahead long enough to be there when the cure comes along,” he said. Pratchett also became a vocal supporter of assisted dying, declaring that he was appalled by the state of UK law.

He began to experience difficulties with reading and had to start dictating his works to his assistant, or by using speech recognition software. His final book, another Discworld novel, was completed last summer before he succumbed to a chest infection.

He died surrounded by his family, with his cat sleeping soundly on his bed. The first tweet announcing the news was composed in capital letters, which was how Pratchett portrayed the character of Death in his novels. “AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER,” it stated.

In 2009 he was “delighted, honoured and, needless to say, flabbergasted” to be given a knighthood for his services to literature. He once joked that he was most proud of growing a 3lb carrot — “Oh, and writing a few books.”

Sir Terry Pratchett, OBE, author, was born on April 28, 1948. He died on March 12, 2015, aged 66