Who was Terry Pratchett? Sir Terry Pratchett died two years ago today , at the age of sixty-six. He had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease eight years before and campaigned for the right to assisted suicide and Alzheimer's awareness. Over £40,000 was raised for The Research Institute for the Care of Older People following the announcement of his death. He was Britain's best-selling author, only temporarily eclipsed by JK Rowling. "The space between the young readers eyeballs and the printed page is a holy place and officialdom should trample all over it at their peril." Sir Pterry's - and I'll explain that nickname in a moment - first novel was The Carpet People , published in 1971, when he was 23. The first of his novels that I read was Only You Can Save Mankind , when I was ten-years-old, in 1999. A year or two later I read the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic , and Jingo , the latter purely because it was ...
Popularised science from University of Manchester students