Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) was an English author best known for the Discworld series, a sequence of forty-one comic fantasy novels set on a flat world carried through space on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle. Across four decades, the Discworld grew from a parody of sword-and-sorcery fantasy into one of the most sustained works of social satire in English literature, examining politics, religion, science, gender, race, capitalism, and the nature of stories themselves. Pratchett was born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, in 1948 and published his first short story at thirteen. He worked as a journalist and press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board before the success of The Colour of Magic (1983) and its sequel allowed him to write full-time in 1987. He wrote prolifically for the rest of his life, producing at least one novel per year across most of the 1990s and 2000s while also collaborating with Neil Gaiman (Good Omens, 1990), Stephen Baxter (the Long Earth series), and Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen (the Science of Discworld series). He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1998 and was knighted in 2009 for services to literature. In December 2007 he announced that he had been diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. He donated £1 million to Alzheimer's Research UK, delivered the Richard Dimbleby Lecture on assisted dying in 2010, and campaigned publicly for dementia research and end-of-life rights until he was no longer able to do so. He continued writing with the help of assistants and voice-recognition software. His final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, was completed before his death and published posthumously in August 2015. He died on 12 March 2015 at his home in Wiltshire, with his family beside him and his cat on his bed. He was sixty-six. At the time of his death he was the second-bestselling author in the United Kingdom, behind J.K. Rowling. His books have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than forty languages.
