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Ex-Bristol journalist Terry Pratchett dies
Former Bristol journalist Terry Pratchett has died at the age of 66. The bestselling author had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last eight years.
A series of tweets announced his death at just after 3pm on Thursday.
The tweets began in the voice of Pratchett’s character Death from his Discworld series of novels:”AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER. Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night. The End.”
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Larry Finlay, managing director at Transworld Publishers, said Sir Terry “passed away in his home, with his cat sleeping on his bed, surrounded by his family”.
He completed his last book in summer 2014. Over his career, he sold more than 65 million books which were translated into 37 different languages.
Finlay said: “In over 70 books, Terry enriched the planet like few before him. As all who read him know, Discworld was his vehicle to satirise this world; he did so brilliantly, with great skill, enormous humour and constant invention.
“Terry faced his Alzheimer’s disease (an ’embuggerance’, as he called it) publicly and bravely. Over the last few years, it was his writing that sustained him. His legacy will endure for decades to come.
“My sympathies go out to Terry’s wife Lyn, their daughter Rhianna, to his close friend Rob Wilkins, and to all closest to him.”
Sir Terry started out as a reporter for the Bucks Free Press, later joining the Western Daily Press and the Bath Chronicle before becoming a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board in 1980.
He once compared Bristol’s newest buildings to a toy town, telling the Bristol Post on a visit to the city in 2008 before pledging £500,000 of his own money to Alzheimer’s research: “The difficulty of coming to Bristol is that I never recognise it. Some bloke has dropped some Lego down near the harbour.
“They move it around an awful lot but haven’t put any Lego people there yet.
“I miss the old days. But everyone misses the old days. Anyone who has been in Bristol for five years misses the old days.”
Pratchett published his first novel, The Carpet People, in 1971 and in 1983 published the first of the hugely popular Discworld series, The Colour Of Magic.
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