SOURCE: Pratchett, Terry, and Elizabeth Young. “Terry Pratchett's Weird World.” Guardian (24 October 1998): 10.

In the following interview, Young attempts to define the forces that drive Pratchett to write within the fantasy genre.

Terry Pratchett has finally achieved the status of a national institution as our foremost comic novelist. He is the literary equivalent of John Peel—similarly known as a lovely man. Modest, unpretentious, ironic, both he and Peel emanate a comfortable sort of mild subversion, like a favourite woolly jumper at a black-tie dinner.

It would be worse than uncharitable to mutter, like the mother in the Louis MacNeice poem presented with her fifth baby, ‘Take it away; I'm through with overproduction’. Yet, to the twisted soul of the bibliophile, it is never wholly easy to see a beloved author pass from cult status into mass cultural acceptance. Having feasted rapaciously and virtually in private, sometimes for years...