Rob Wilkins met Terry Pratchett through his first publisher, then became his PA and helped him with the “embuggerance” of the early onset Alzheimer’s that led to the novelist’s untimely death. He is Pratchett’s Boswell, and fans of the Discworld creator’s inspired satirical take on humankind will relish this intimate portrait. With affectionate verve he relates Pratchett’s rise from fiddling with crystal radios through local journalism to astonishingly rapid writing success.
Omnivorous reading was key. Once The Wind in the Willows woke Pratchett to the imaginative possibilities of books, he haunted the local library, storming through not just Just William, Biggles, Tolkien and sci-fi galore, but the whole of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
Unsurprisingly, children’s literacy was the charitable cause closest
