Terry Pratchett
World record holder of the ten book dash, gold medalist in the humour heptathlon and undisputed champion of the signing endurance test. All this despite his claims that he has a defective sports gene.
Terry Pratchett has written so many books that you'd need the fingers and toes of five orang-utans to keep track of them all. (Only do this if you no longer need your own fingers and toes.) Going Postal, the thirty-third novel in the Discworld sequence, was published in October 2004 (accompanied by a growing selection of stamps from the Cunning Artificer, Bernard Pearson), followed in 2005 by Thud!.
On the children's book front, Thud! also sired Where's My Cow (a book that Vimes reads to his young son every night) which was also published in 2005 followed by Wintersmith, the third Tiffany Aching novel, in September 2006. While still regularly turning out adults' books, these last two books mark the continuation of Terry's work on children's books over the last few years. His enjoyment of writing children's books and the necessity of keeping the Discworld series fresh are two of the reasons for the change of pace.
Naturally, grown ups are allowed to read these books too, and many do so. When Terry asked at the 2004 Discworld Convention if he should read extracts from the unpublished Going Postal or Wintersmith, the audience vote was decidedly for Wintersmith, much to his amusement. No sign of "adult" covers for these books, although the early books in the Discworld series have undergone a successful black and white revamp, the most recent being The Last Continent (February 2006).
2006 also saw the appearance of a three-part adaptation of Johnny and the Bomb on BBC1, the announcement that Sam Raimi plans to direct The Wee Free Men film and the showing of a four-hour television adaptation of Hogfather (by MOB Films) which was transmitted in the UK over Christmas 2006 on Sky 1. The adaptation has since gone on to win 2 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards.
In the summer of 1998, Terry was named in the Queen's 1998 Birthday Honours List 'for services to literature'
and was invested with the Order of the British Empire (OBE) at Buckingham Palace on 26th November 1998. In July 1999, he received an honorary Doctorate of Literature (D.Litt.) from the University of Warwick, a similar honour from the University of Portsmouth in 2001 and a third from the University of Bath in December 2003.