Philip Pullman

Having written his first novel, Galatea, in the late 1970s, Philip Pullman in 1995 published Northern Lights—released as The Golden Compass in the U.S.—the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy. “I was sure that I was going to write stories myself when I grew up,” he once claimed. “It’s important to put it like that: not ‘I am a writer,’ but rather ‘I write stories.’ If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you’re in danger of thinking that you’re the most important thing.”