The writer Terry Pratchett, who took millions of readers on a madcap journey to the universe of Discworld, has died aged 66.
The announcement came in typically irreverent manner on the author’s Twitter feed, with a series of tweets beginning in the voice of his character, Death: “AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.”
“Terry took Death’s arm,” the following tweet read, “and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.”
Pratchett’s publisher, Larry Finlay, paid tribute to one of the world’s “brightest, sharpest minds”.
“In over 70 books, Terry enriched the planet like few before him,” Finlay said. “As all who read him know, Discworld was his vehicle to satirise this world: he did so brilliantly, with great skill, enormous humour and constant invention.”
The author died at his home “with his cat sleeping on his bed, surrounded by his family” on Thursday, said Finlay.
Pratchett announced his diagnosis with early onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2007 – calling it “an embuggerance”. He pulled out of a planned summer Discworld festival earlier this year, saying “the Embuggerance is finally catching up with me”.
With more than 75m copies sold around the world, Pratchett became one of the UK’s most-loved writers after the publication of his first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, in 1983. The 40th, Raising Steam, was released last year, with the writer completing recent work using voice-recognition software.
He recently teamed up with the science fiction writer Stephen Baxter for the “Long Earth” series of novels, the fourth of which – The Long Utopia – is due out in the summer.
The announcement of his death unleashed a tide of sympathy from around the world. David Cameron tweeted: “Sad to hear of Sir Terry Pratchett’s death, his books fired the imagination of millions and he fearlessly campaigned for dementia awareness.”
The author Neil Gaiman, a friend and collaborator, tweeted: “I will miss you, Terry, so much.”
The novelist AS Byatt, a longtime champion of Pratchett’s work, told the Guardian: “No writer in my lifetime has given me as much pleasure and happiness. He could do knockabout for schoolboys (and girls) but he was also subtle and wise and very funny in the adult world. I loved him because almost all the characters he didn’t like slowly grew more real, more interesting, more complicated perhaps to his own surprise.
“He could write evil if he needed to, but if he didn’t his characters surprised us and him. His prose was layered: there was a mischievous surface, and a layer of complicated running jokes, and something steely and uncompromising that turned the reader cold from time to time. He was my unlikely hero, and saved me from disaster more than once by making me laugh and making me think.”
The Booker prizewinning Canadian writer Margaret Atwood added her voice, tweeting that she was “Very sad to hear of the death of #terrypratchett. I vastly enjoy his playful, smart #Discworld books.”
Born in 1948, Pratchett left school at 17 to work on his local paper, the Bucks Free Press. Speaking to the Guardian in 2011, he argued that “there can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town. All the court cases, such crimes as there were. You got to know the coppers, they told you stuff – for a young man with a pencil, you could do what you wanted, really.”
He began writing a series of stories for the newspaper’s children’s corner about a tribe of people called the Munrungs living on a world called Carpet, which became his first novel, The Carpet People, published in 1971. But it was the novel he wrote while working as a publicity officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board, The Colour of Magic, which landed him a six-book deal and allowed him to write full time. In 1996, he became the UK’s top-selling and highest-earning author.
The characters of his fantastical creation, Discworld, inhabit a world held up by four elephants balanced on the back of a giant turtle. It is a world peopled by incompetent wizards, upside-down mountains, slow-witted barbarians and a wry incarnation of Death. Begun as a cheerful parody of fantasy authors from JRR Tolkien to Ursula K Le Guin, Pratchett’s ambitions gradually expanded to encompass life, death and humanity’s place in the universe – though the jokes kept coming.
“The further back you go the more juvenile they appear,” he told the Guardian in 2011. “There’s funny and joking, the two are different … As things progressed, both with adult and junior books, I found that in subtle kinds of ways, without being preachy at all, you could suggest rather interesting things.”
According to Neil Gaiman, who co-wrote 1990’s Good Omens with him, Pratchett’s writing is powered by “fury … it’s the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld. It’s also the anger at the headmaster who would decide that six-year-old Terry Pratchett would never be smart enough for the 11-plus; anger at pompous critics, and at those who think serious is the opposite of funny; anger at his early American publishers who could not bring his books out successfully.”
After his diagnosis in 2007 this anger shifted its focus, Gaiman continued, turning towards “his brain and his genetics and, more than these, furious at a country that would not permit him (or others in a similarly intolerable situation) to choose the manner and the time of their passing”.
Pratchett became an eloquent advocate for assisted dying, arguing for a “strictly non-aggressive tribunal that would establish the facts of the case well before the assisted death takes place” .
“I would like to die peacefully with Thomas Tallis on my iPod before the disease takes me over,” he continued, “and I hope that will not be for quite some time to come, because if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.”
Pratchett was knighted for services to literature in the 2009 new year’s honours and he received the World Fantasy award for life achievement in 2010. But for Gaiman no honour could do justice to his lifetime’s work.
He wrote: “As Terry walks into the darkness much too soon, I find myself raging too: at the injustice that deprives us of – what? Another 20 or 30 books? Another shelf-full of ideas and glorious phrases and old friends and new, of stories in which people do what they really do best, which is use their heads to get themselves out of the trouble they got into by not thinking?”
“I rage at the imminent loss of my friend,” Gaiman continued, “And I think, ‘What would Terry do with this anger?’ Then I pick up my pen, and I start to write.”
