Reading stars

Philip Pullman - full interview

Did you write His Dark Materials for children?
I don't know about this business of writing for this audience or that one. It's too like labelling the book as fantasy it shuts out more readers than it includes. If I think of my audience at all, I think of a group that includes adults, children, male, female, old, middle-aged, young everyone who can read. If horses, dogs, cats, or pigeons could read, they'd be welcome to it as well. I don't want to shut anyone out.

Why do you believe stories are so important?
Because they entertain and they teach; they help us both enjoy life and endure it. After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

Where and when do you write?
I write in my shed, at the bottom of the garden. It's quite comfortable in there, but because of my superstition about not tidying it during the course of a book, it's now an abominable tip. I write three pages every day (one side of the paper only). That's about 1100 words. Then I stop, having made sure to write the first sentence on the next page, so I never have a blank page facing me in the morning.

How long does it take to write a book?
Northern Lights took two years, and so did The Subtle Knife. The Amber Spyglass has taken three. But they were all long books. Short books take less time, not surprisingly.

How did you come up with the idea of dæmons?
When I first saw Lyra in my mind's eye, there was someone or something close by, which I realised was an important part of her. When I wrote the first four words of Northern Lights: "Lyra and her dæmon" the relationship suddenly sprang into focus. One very important thing is that children's dæmons can change shape, whereas they gradually lose the power to change during adolescence, and adults' dæmons have one fixed animal shape which they keep for the rest of their lives. The dæmon, and especially the way it grows and develops with its person, expresses a truth about human nature which it would have been hard to show so vividly otherwise.

What would you choose as your own dæmon?
You can't choose that's the point. You have to make the best of whatever your nature is. As an old sailor says to Lyra in Northern Lights, "There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle." If you do want to know what your dæmon is likely to be, the best way to find out is to ask your friends to tell you anonymously.

Which children's writers do you admire?
Lots. Peter Dickinson, Jan Mark, Anne Fine, Jacqueline Wilson, Janni Howker, Michael Morpurgo, Allan Ahlberg - too many to name, really.

What was your favourite book as a child?
Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding.

Which books have made a difference to your life?
Grimm's Fairy Tales, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, the Superman and Batman comics which were published when I was young i.e. before they became dark' and self-consciously post-modernist, The Picture History of Painting by H.W. and D.J. Janson which I bought with a book token when I was fifteen, and Bernard Shaw's Collected Letters.

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