The morning after sending his latest manuscript off to the publisher, Terry Pratchett would walk into his office a bundle of nerves. “At some point during the afternoon, the phone would ring on the other side of the room,” recalls Rob Wilkins, Pratchett’s friend, personal assistant and the manager of the Pratchett estate since the beloved fantasy author’s death in 2015. “He’d pick up the phone. I would only hear one side of the call. It would be, ‘Okay, yep, okay, right, bye’. The phone would go down.”
Only then, Wilkins recalls, would Pratchett visibly relax. The call had been from his publisher and the news was good: Pratchett had delivered another book that was fit to print. Until that moment, Pratchett had been on tenterhooks. The fear of rejection – that secret terror lurking in every author’s heart – had never entirely gone away.
“He would then turn to me and say, ‘We’ve got away with it again.’ The editor on the end of the phone would say, ‘There’s a novel. You’ve done it.’ Seeing him waiting to acknowledge that the book was there – it was a novel – there was doubt. But it only manifested itself like that.”
Pratchett was a best-selling writer, national treasure and the answer to the question: what if JRR Tolkien and PG Wodehouse were the same person? How strange, then, to picture him creased up with anxiety with every new novel. But, as his friends and colleagues fondly recall, Pratchett was a complex and contradictory figure. He always had been, from the publication in 1983 of his first book set in his brilliantly imagined universe of Discworld, The Colour of Magic, to his heartbreaking swansong, The Shepherd’s Crown, which came out six months after his passing.
He would also have been deeply sceptical about the concept of a “Terry Pratchett Day” – a celebration of his life and legacy held every year on his birthday of 28 April. This year, Pratchett fans are encouraged to take to social media and share their favourite Pratchett book, quote, character, or more simply, “what Terry means to you”. “He would have disapproved immensely,” laughs Wilkins. “Disbelief – that’s what he would have thought. How on earth has this ever happened?”
As a former journalist, Pratchett was always eager to make a big splash. He wanted to be successful, for his work to reach the widest audience possible. But he was wary of big‑money advances, feeling they were a distraction from the unglamorous work of getting a new novel out into the world. He despaired of writers who received huge up-front cheques because of their perceived social status.
“I won’t name names – I certainly won’t name Jeffrey Archer. But it would drive Terry mad when he would hear at publishing parties that certain people were being paid advances that would never earn out,” says Wilkins. “There was no correlation between sales and what the advance was.”
This frustrated Pratchett, who felt the measure of an author’s worth should be how many books they sold, not their reputation or their profile within the book industry. “Terry would say, ‘Why?’ It would just be, ‘Lord whoever, who owned the publishing house, wants to publish whoever’. It would drive Terry mad.”
Another contradiction was the fact that Pratchett was both a control freak and a writer who was hugely generous with his collaborators. He wrote the novels he wanted to write and did not pander to either his publishers or the ever‑expanding fanbase Discworld attracted.
But he also struck up a rich creative relationship with artist Paul Kidby, whose visual interpretations of Pratchett’s work are credited with deepening the author’s appreciation and understanding of his own world.
It had not been easy for Kidby to get in contact with Pratchett. After the original cover artist of the Discworld novels, Josh Kirby, died in 2001, Kidby felt he had something to offer. But when Pratchett’s publisher rebuffed his advances, he went straight to the source – bringing a collection of his artwork to Pratchett at a book signing. Stunned by Kidby’s evocative portrayal of Discworld, Pratchett got back in touch shortly afterwards and suggested they work together.
“There were a couple of attempts. I sent some photographs of my work into the publishers initially and didn’t hear anything back,” says Kidby, who, this October, will publish The Discworld Bestiary – a sumptuous illustrated guide to the “creatures and critters” of the Pratchett-verse. “It was the realisation that, well, maybe the publishers aren’t that interested. It would be good to go direct to the man himself. That’s what I did. And it worked.”
The relationship got off to a potentially rocky start when the publisher rejected Kidby’s first cover art, for the novel Night Watch, as “too brown”. But “too brown” was the point – the illustration was an homage to Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Pratchett put his foot down on behalf of his new collaborator. He was still finishing the book – and was so struck by the melancholic quality of the illustration that some of that ennui seeped into his writing.
Night Watch, published in 2003, marked a new chapter in Pratchett’s career. If still full of the wry humour that was his trademark, it was also more serious and poignant than his previous work. It tells the story of a member of the city guard in the metropolis of Ankh‑Morpork (Pratchett’s version of Tolkien’s Gondor) who goes back in time and must take on the identity of his old mentor – and train his younger self.
The respected science-fiction editor Gardner Dozois described it as one of the greatest fantasy novels of the 21st century. Blockbusting fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson says it is “possibly the greatest piece of fantasy ever written”. Critics raved, too: for perhaps the first time in his career, Pratchett was regarded as something other than the spinner of droll fantasy tales.
“Paul comes in and shows Terry what he’s working on with Night Watch. Terry had not gone there. Night Watch was actually called Forest of the Mind at that moment in time. He renamed it Night Watch,” says Wilkins. “For Terry to have taken the story he was many thousands of words into at that point and to have taken a right‑hand turn – that was entirely because of Paul’s artwork. For me, something happened to Terry’s career at the time of Night Watch, the writing of it – and a large lump of that has to be down to Paul walking through the door with his Rembrandt parody and that filling the hole in Terry’s own brain that he didn’t know needed filling.”
Pratchett was also friendly with fantasy author Neil Gaiman, best known for the Sandman graphic novels. Both writers were relatively early in their careers when they collaborated on the beloved 1990 romp Good Omens, about an angel and a demon who strike up an unlikely friendship.
The novel was adapted for the screen by Gaiman in 2019 with David Tennant and Michael Sheen perfectly cast as the devilish Crowley and angelic Aziraphale. However, in 2024 and 2025 Gaiman was accused of sexual misconduct by eight women (claims he has denied). A final feature‑length episode of Good Omens comes to Prime Video in May – but Gaiman is no longer involved.
The relationship “was very friendly”, says Wilkins, who reveals that plans for a Good Omens II never got past the “plotting out” stage as both their careers took off. “Neil would come to the house in the early days. And then Neil became Neil [i.e. a megastar author], and they barely spoke for a decade. It was only when Neil came back here to Terry’s writing room and Terry entrusted Neil to write Good Omens for the screen – that was season one. What we ended up with was a very good ‘Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens’. That was from Neil’s pen. Terry would have been satisfied.”
What would Pratchett have made of the serious allegations against Gaiman? “I have no idea. I really have no idea. I know what I personally feel that he would have felt, but it’s probably best that I don’t commit that to record,” says Wilkins. “I’m very definite about what Terry would feel about certain things. The banking crash and things like that – Terry had already written them down [he predicted the 2008 financial collapse in his book Making Money]. The worldwide chaos we are experiencing at the moment – Terry had predicted it. It is very easy for me to have an opinion about what Terry would think about those things. But I can’t really say [regarding Gaiman]. I don’t want to attribute something to Terry that he can’t tell me I’ve got completely wrong.”
It’s 11 years since Pratchett died from Alzheimer’s disease, aged just 66. In that time, even best-selling authors can see their popularity tail off, their profile dwindle. Not Pratchett, who continues to sell in huge numbers (100 million books and counting, in 43 languages) and is arguably more adored than ever.
“We are always surprised when it comes down to practical things, like looking at the half‑year sales figures,” says Rob Wilkins. “Where are those people who are still buying The Colour of Magic coming from? And they still do – every half year they come out and buy as many as they did, and more, than in the last half year. It is remarkable that Terry’s legacy is not just maintaining, it is actually increasing. And that’s on this side of the Atlantic, the other side of the Atlantic. All across the world, Terry’s legacy seems to be getting stronger than ever.”
Terry Pratchett Day is on 28 April. The final feature-length episode of ‘Good Omens’ comes to Prime Video on 13 May. Paul Kidby’s ‘Discworld Bestiary’ is published in October