I've not Read Enough Pratchett: A life in writing & the Goddess Narrativia | The Guardian

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Excerpt:

"Terry Pratchett is having a statue made. It's a statue of a goddess, and he thinks she ought probably to be smoking a cigarette, and to be showing one breast. "There should be an urn, too. If there's an urn it's not porn – that's a Discworld cliché," he says, a bubble of laughter in his voice.

The goddess is one of Pratchett's own invention: Narrativia, the deity of narrative who smiles on writers (and perhaps especially sunnily on her creator). Discworld, created by Pratchett 28 years ago, is the fantasy world held up by four elephants balanced on the back of a giant turtle. It's a concept which started out as an affectionate lampoon of the sword-and-sorcery fantasy genre, but it has, over the years, become an increasingly sophisticated swipe at contemporary society, pointing out the ridiculousness of everything from Hollywood to the postal service, newspapers, banks and football.

And Narrativia has been beside him all the way. "If you've been a good boy and worked at what you're doing, then the goddess Narrativia will smile on you," he says, recounting his delight at a particular piece of her work, when he was writing Thief of Time more than a decade ago. He decided to call one of his characters Ronnie Soak. Soak is the fifth horseman of the apocalypse – the one who left before they got famous. His name was picked at random, so Pratchett was astonished when he noticed what it sounded like backwards. Suddenly, he knew of what this particular horseman would be a harbinger. "I thought chaos – yes! Chaos, the oldest," he says. "Stuff just turns up like that."

In typically ebullient fashion, Thief of Time also contains a sprinkling of yetis, a clock which will stop time and the Monks of History, whose job it is to manage time, moving it from where it isn't needed (underwater) to where it is (cities). AS Byatt said on the book's publication that it should have been nominated for the Booker prize. But it was a fantasy novel; it was funny; it was a bestseller. Unsurprisingly enough, it wasn't.And despite Pratchett's immense popularity (75 million copies sold of his 67 books), it took a while for the literary establishment to notice – apart from Byatt. She is, she says, still a fan today, calling him "a great storyteller, and splendidly inventive with the English language – both as farce and as comedy and as (successful) dreadful jokes for teenagers. I also think he's wise and morally complicated. And grown up, although he appeals to the young."

It wasn't until 2001 that Pratchett won his first major literary prize, the Carnegie medal, for his first Discworld novel for children, the Pied Piper-riffing The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. He's since been knighted for services to literature ("I think they must have had a bit of a snigger. Let's give a fantasy writer a knighthood, he should have some fun with that") and received a handful of honorary degrees, with Trinity College Dublin making him a professor...."