“Of all the dead authors in the world, Terry Pratchett is the most alive,” said John Lloyd at the author’s memorial in 2015. This sentiment remains as true now, 40 years after the publication of Pratchett’s first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic. The anniversary has been commemorated in a set of illustrated Royal Mail stamps. There’s been a show dedicated to Pratchett at the Edinburgh fringe. A Kickstarter for a graphic novel adaptation of Good Omens, the book he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman, became the number one comics campaign in Kickstarter history, bringing in more than £2.4m; a second series of the TV adaptation was also released.
All this would make 2023 an impressive year by any writer’s standards – but happened in the month of August alone. The big event comes this month, with the publication of A Stroke of the Pen, a collection of rediscovered early stories. This past year also brought an animated adaptation of Pratchett’s children’s novel The Amazing Maurice, and a new set of Discworld audiobooks.
