Biography

With a beautiful letter, he convinced Nicole Kidman to take the role as Marisa Coulter in The Golden Compass (2007).

Winner (22 January 2002) of the Whitbread Book of the Year prize for "The Amber Spyglass", the third of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy.

He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2004 Queen's New Years Honours List for his services to Literature.

Film rights to his young adult fantasy novella "Clockwork" were optioned by Universal, for children's television producer Ilene Staple (2002).

On 24 June 2009, he received the D. Litt. degree (Doctor of Letters), honoris causa, from the University of Oxford at the Encaenia ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre.

Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.

[his reply to the question "what do you do about writer's block?"] "I don't believe in it. All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?"

Accepting the Carnegie Medal in 1996: "All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions ... We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. 'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever."

[on the "Dark Materials" Trilogy] I think what I would say to the people who criticise me for besmirching their religion and telling children that they should all go out and be Satanists is simply this. What qualities in human beings does the story celebrate and what qualities does it condemn? And an honest reading of the story would have to admit that the qualities that the story celebrates and praises are love, kindness, tolerance, courage, open-heartedness; and the qualities that the story condemns are cruelty, intolerance, zealotry, fanaticism. Well who could quarrel with that?

We need joy, we need a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, we need a connection with the universe, we need all the things the Kingdom of Heaven used to promise us but failed to deliver.