Philip Pullman - Dæmon Voices

PHILIP PULLMAN is one of the most acclaimed writers working today. He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which has been named one of the top 100 novels of all time by Newsweek. He has also won many distinguished prizes, including the Carnegie Medal for Northern Lights (and the reader-voted Carnegie of Carnegies for the best childrens book of the past seventy years); the Whitbread (now Costa) Award for The Amber Spyglass; and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, in honour of his body of work. The first volume of Philip Pullmans long-awaited trilogy The Book of Dust, set in the same world as His Dark Materials, published in 2017.

Philip Pullman lives in Oxford, England. To learn more, please visit www.philip-pullman.com or follow him on Twitter at @PhilipPullman.

SIMON MASON writes books for both children and adults. His first adult novel won the Betty Trask First Novel award, while Moon Pie, a novel for young adults, was shortlisted for the Guardian Childrens Fiction prize. Running Girl, his first Garvie Smith mystery novel, was shortlisted for the Costa Childrens Book award. Kid got Shot, the second, won Crimefests best Crime Novel for YA in 2017. Simon lives in Oxford, England.

By the Author

I am grateful to all the organisations that invited me to speak to them, and thus sponsored the pieces in this collection that were given as lectures or talks, and to the editors of the newspapers, journals and books where some of the other pieces were first published. My particular thanks go to David Fickling, whose generous insistence that it would be worth publishing them again overcame my idleness and reluctance to lift a finger and search them out, and especially to Simon Mason, whose skill, tact and industry vastly improved the raw material I found for himsome of it very raw indeed. What he did is a model of good and unobtrusive editing at its very best. My most long-standing gratitude goes to my readers, and to the publishers, booksellers, librarians and teachers who have brought my books to them over the years.

By the Editor

All books are collaborative. This book exists because of cover and interior design by Laurence Denmark of Webb and Webb, an original concept by Ness Wood, cover art by John Lawrence, copyediting by Sue Cook, proofreading by Julia Bruce, picture permissions arranged by Jane Smith, text permissions arranged by Connie Robertson, index by Christine Shuttleworth, additional image scanning and balancing by Paul Duffield, production and design management by Alison Gadsby and production control by Rachel Woodforde. Special thanks go to Anthony Hinton, who, as the in-house editor, has liaised with all the above, solving problems along the way, and has kept the book to its schedule with wonderful efficiency. David Fickling has been the books guiding spirit from the beginning. But, above all, my thanks go to Philip for the essays themselves, and for the opportunity to work with him on them, a hugely enjoyable and stimulating experience.

We are very grateful to all of Philip Pullmans publishers, including but not limited to Scholastic, Penguin Random House, Canongate, and Oxford University Press for their kind permission to reproduce extracts from his own work, both text and images, within the essays in this collection.

We are also grateful to the following for their kind permission to reproduce copyright material used within these essays:

Magic Carpets

Leon Garfield: extract from The Pleasure Garden (Kestrel, 1976), used by permission of the Estate of Leon Garfield c/o Johnson & Alcock Ltd.

The Writing of Stories

Robert Frost: lines from The Road Not Taken from The Collected Poems of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem (Vintage, 2013), used by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. Mark Turner: extract from Image Schemas in The Literary Mind: the origins of thought and language (OUP, 1998), used by permission of Oxford University Press.

P G Wodehouse: extract from Aunts Arent Gentlemen (Barrie & Jenkins, 1974), copyright P G Wodehouse 1974, used by permission of the Estate of P G Wodehouse c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.

Heinrich von Kleist

Heinrich von Kleist: extract from On the Marionette Theatre from Hand to Mouth and Other Essays introduced and translated by Idris Parry (Carcanet, 1981), used by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.

Paradise Lost

Michael Burgesse after John Baptist Medina, for Book XII of Paradise Lost Image provided by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Christs College, Cambridge

The Origin of the Universe

George Orwell: extract from Animal Farm (Penguin Classics, 2000) copyright George Orwell 1945, used by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell, c/o A M Heath & Co Ltd.

The Path through the Wood

Mulefa Visualization Eric Dubois

Robert Frost: lines from The Road Not Taken from The Collected Poems of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem (Vintage, 2013), used by permission of The Random House Group Ltd

Childrens Literature Without Borders

Richmal Crompton: extract from Still William, Book 5 in the William series (Macmillan Childrens Books, 2016), copyright Richmal Crompton 1925, used by permission of United Agents LLP on behalf of Catherine Massey and Edward Ashbee.

Lets Write it in Red

Peter Bogdanovich (Ed): Who the Devil Made It? (Knopf, 1997), copyright 1997 by Ivy Moon Company, extracts of conversations with Allan Dwan, Fritz Lang and Howard Hawks used by permission of Alfred A Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Leon Garfield: extract from The Pleasure Garden (Kestrel, 1976), used by permission of the Estate of Leon Garfield c/o Johnson & Alcock Ltd.

Janni Howker: extract from The Nature of the Beast (Walker, 1996), copyright Janni Howker 1985, used by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ, www.walker.co.uk.

Heinrich von Kleist: extract from On the Marionette Theatre from Hand to Mouth and Other Essays introduced and translated by Idris Parry (Carcanet, 1981), used by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
Charles Rosen: extracts from The Great Inventor, a review of Bach and the Patterns of Invention by Laurence Dreyfus, The New York Review of Books, 9 Oct 1997, used by permission of The New York Review of Books.

Wallace Stevens: lines from The Name of the Jar from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Faber, 2006), used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

Epics

Jane Smiley: extract from Preface to The Sagas of Icelanders (Penguin, 2001), Preface copyright Jane Smiley 2000, used by permission of Penguin Books Ltd

As Clear as Water

James Merrill: extract from The Book of Ephraim from The Changing Light at Sandover: A poem (Atheneum, 1980), copyright 1980, 1982 by James Merrill, used by permission of Alfred A Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergre

A Bar at the Folies-Bergre by douard Manet Alamy/Archivart/ Edouard Manet/Bar at Folie-Bergre 1882