Is Philip Pullman the Next J.K. Rowling?
July 13 -- He may be a boy wizard, but Harry Potter's power is about to be challenged.
The young wizard and his creator, J.K. Rowling, have set new standards for children's literature — both in the number of books sold and tickets bought for the movie they inspired.
But now another British fantasy writer, a different voice, is showing signs of becoming the next big thing.
"My primary responsibility is to the story, which comes to me and says, 'tell me and do the best job you can,'" says Philip Pullman, author of the trilogy His Dark Materials.
The immensely popular books consist of lengthy tales about a pair of pre-teens named Lyra and Will, whose travels and adventures have them fighting monsters and befriending strange beasts like armored bears. It is more complicated than one might expect from children's novels.
"I think that probably his books are actually better than the Harry Potter series," says 10-year-old Christopher Perry. "Magic ... everything all in one. It was fantastic. Really, really good books. Very enjoyable."
If sales are the measure of success, Pullman is definitely on his way. The 55-year-old author has sold 1.3 million books in Britain alone. He has been published in 21 languages and Americans are catching on to an author who has been writing in Britain for 30 years.
"To me he is a magical writer. He is someone who makes stories come alive. I think some children would find them, you know, quite scary, but I think they are mostly quite gripping," 18-year-old Anna Johnson said.
Set in Oxford
The city of Oxford is both the primary setting for the trilogy and the source of inspiration for the writer. Pullman was schooled at Oxford, and he also taught there.
He does his writing in a garden shed behind his Oxford home where the author is left alone with his thoughts and idiosyncracies.
"If I'm writing a story, I like to do it in pen and in longhand because I like the physical process of making the mark on the page. And there's another reason too; I write a regular amount each day. I write three pages a day," Pullman says.
