OXFORD – Fans of Philip Pullman had been ready virtually 5 years for the overall instalment in the writer’s sextet of books about his intrepid heroine Lyra and her adventures in more than one worlds. They gained’t have to wait an excessive amount of longer.
Pullman says he has written 500 pages of a 540-page novel to conclude the “Book of Dust” trilogy, and it will have to be printed next yr — despite the fact that he nonetheless doesn’t know what it’s referred to as.
“I haven’t got a title yet,” Pullman informed The Associated Press in his house town of Oxford, the place he used to be honored Thursday with the Bodley Medal. “Titles either come at once or they take ages and ages and ages. I haven’t found the right title yet — but I will.”
The medal, awarded by way of Oxford University’s 400-year-old Bodleian Libraries, honors contributions to literature, media or science. Its earlier recipients come with World Wide Web writer Tim Berners-Lee, physicist Stephen Hawking and novelists Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith and Colm Tóibín.
Pullman, 77, used to be known for a frame of labor that comes with the “Northern Lights” trilogy and its sequel, “The Book of Dust.” The saga is set in an alternate model of Oxford — historical faculties, misty quadrangles, engaging libraries -– that blends the unfashionable, the futuristic and the fantastical. In Pullman’s maximum putting act of creativeness, each and every human has an inseparable animal soul mate referred to as a daemon (pronounced demon).
The tales are rollicking adventures that take Lyra from youth into younger maturity and take on humanity’s greatest questions: What is the essence of existence? Is there a God? What occurs when we die? They are a number of the maximum a hit fable collection in historical past. Pullman’s writer says the primary trilogy has offered 17.5 million copies around the globe. A BBC- and HBO-backed TV collection that ran for 3 seasons beginning in 2019 gained much more fans.
Pullman says the next book shall be his ultimate foray into Lyra’s international -– despite the fact that he additionally mentioned that once the primary trilogy, simplest to be tempted again.
“I can’t see myself coming back to it,” he mentioned. “There are other things I want to do,” together with a book about phrases and pictures and how they paintings in combination at the creativeness.
Pullman is an atheist, and his unflattering depiction of arranged faith in the novels, which characteristic an authoritarian church frame referred to as the Magisterium, has drawn grievance from some Christian teams. His books had been pulled from some Catholic faculty library cabinets in Canada and the United States through the years.
Yet Pullman has fans amongst other folks of religion. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who as soon as led the arena’s 85 million Anglicans, stated on the medal rite that “we’re not entirely of one mind on every subject.” But he praised Pullman’s “extraordinarily comprehensive, broad imagination.”
“I have a strong suspicion that the God Philip doesn’t believe in is the God I don’t believe in either,” Williams mentioned.
Pullman says he doesn’t thoughts being banned — it’s just right for gross sales — however worries there is a rising censoriousness in fashionable tradition that tells authors they will have to simplest “write about things that you know.”
“Where would any literature be, where would any drama be, if you could only write about things you know or the people you come from? It’s absolute nonsense,” he mentioned. “Trust the imagination. And if the imagination gets it wrong, well so what? You don’t have read the book, just ignore it, it’ll disappear.”