Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman's father was a Royal Air Force pilot and when the family wasn't traveling for his job, they spent most of their time in North Wales. His father died when Pullman was seven and his mother remarried. Pullman discovered John Milton's Paradise Lost as a teenager and was later drawn to the illustrations of William Blake. Both would go on to be major influences in Pullman's later work, His Dark Materials especially. Beginning in the late 1960s, Pullman taught middle-grade students and wrote children's plays. These plays inspired his first children's book, Count Karlstein. He began writing His Dark Materials in 1993 while teaching at Oxford and after it was published, Pullman turned to writing full time. The entire series has won numerous awards—particularly The Golden Compass and The Amber Spyglass. Throughout his life, Pullman has been an advocate for not age- and gender-labeling children's books, and he's spoken out on behalf of authors' rights to fair compensation for speaking engagements and e-book library loans. As an agnostic and critic of Christianity, Pullman has delighted in the criticism lobbed at His Dark Materials and even asked his publisher to include a critical quote from 1999 in The Amber Spyglass.