Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman is a British author whose His Dark Materials trilogy is the most ambitious and philosophically rich series in modern children's and young adult literature, exploring consciousness, free will, and religious authority across multiple worlds.

Philip Pullman published The Golden Compass (Northern Lights in the UK) in 1995 and in the following years completed one of the most remarkable achievements in children’s literature: a trilogy that uses the conventions of fantasy — alternative worlds, daemons, witches, armored bears — to explore questions of consciousness, free will, religious authority, and what it means to grow up and leave innocence behind. The children’s story that attacks the Church and ends with the death of God is an extraordinary thing to have written; that it works as compelling entertainment makes it more extraordinary still.

The Golden Compass introduces Lyra Belacqua, a girl raised among scholars at a parallel Oxford, in a world where every person’s soul exists externally as an animal companion, a daemon, that changes shape until adulthood. The political intrigue of the first novel gives way in subsequent volumes to something more ambitious: a multiverse in which the idea of the Authority must be confronted and ultimately overthrown.

The Amber Spyglass (2000) won the Whitbread Prize — the only children’s book to have done so — and consolidated Pullman’s reputation as the rare writer capable of making metaphysical argument emotionally devastating. The Book of Dust trilogy, begun in 2017, expands the world around the original trilogy, though without quite matching its emotional compression. Pullman has been a persistent public advocate for children’s reading and against book censorship.