Celebrated children's author Philip Pullman has been made a CBE in the New Year Honours. Philip Pullman is the award-winning author of children's trilogy His Dark Materials.
He was born in Norwich in October 1946 and spent his childhood travelling because his father and step-father were both in the Royal Air Force.
He lived in Australia, South Africa and Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, before moving to North Wales at the age of 11.
After graduating with an English degree from Exeter College, Oxford, he became a teacher for 12 years before taking up a post as a part-time lecturer at Oxford's Westminster College.
Golden touch
It was during his time as a teacher that Pullman began to write children's stories, although his first published novel was for adults.
He eventually left teaching to write full-time and still composes his novels in a shed at the bottom of his garden in Oxford.
In 1996, he won the prestigious UK children's award The Carnegie Medal for Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy.
A second instalment, The Subtle Knife, and the third, The Amber Spyglass, followed.
The Amber Spyglass was the first children's book to be awarded the Whitbread Prize in 2002, and the trilogy has been translated into more than 20 languages around the world.
The story follows Lyra Belacqua, a young half-wild orphan girl who is plunged into a fantasy world of good and evil.
But unlike books such as Harry Potter, His Dark Materials explores deeper and darker moral territory.
The trilogy has sold more than each of the four Harry Potter books.
The series will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during January and the trilogy is also being made into a play which premi
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