Sir Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) was one of the most prolific and beloved British authors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with more than 70 books to his name and worldwide sales exceeding 100 million copies. He began his career as a journalist before publishing his first novel, The Carpet People, in 1971, but it was with The Color of Magic in 1983 that he launched the Discworld series, the comic-fantasy sequence for which he’s best known. Over the following three decades, Pratchett produced 41 Discworld novels, a body of work that uses the conceit of a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle to satirize nearly every aspect of contemporary life, from journalism (The Truth) and organized religion (Small Gods) to policing (Guards! Guards!), banking (Making Money), and postal services (Going Postal).

Beyond Discworld, Pratchett co-authored Good Omens (1990) with Neil Gaiman, a comic apocalypse novel later adapted for television, and wrote the Bromeliad Trilogy for younger readers, as well as the Johnny Maxwell books. His young-adult work, particularly the Tiffany Aching sub-series within Discworld (The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight, and The Shepherd’s Crown), earned him numerous awards, including the Carnegie Medal for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001). He was knighted in 2009 for services to literature.

Across this vast output, certain preoccupations recur. Pratchett was a committed humanist and rationalist whose fiction repeatedly interrogated the tension between religious belief and scientific inquiry and between story and truth. He was fascinated by the way narratives shape human behavior, which he called “narrativium” in The Science of Discworld (1999), and by how societies construct their gods, moralities, and hierarchies. His work returns again and again to characters who refuse to accept inherited authority, such as witches who reject supernatural mystification in favor of practical wisdom, police officers who insist on justice against tyranny, and small gods who exist only insofar as anyone believes in them. He was also a fierce critic of prejudice and used fantasy species like dwarfs, trolls, goblins, and golems as vehicles for exploring racism, class, and the ethics of personhood. Death, one of his most recurrent characters, is portrayed as a rational, even compassionate observer of human folly, reflecting Pratchett’s conviction that mortality should be met with dignity and clear-eyed acceptance rather than superstition.

In December 2007, Pratchett publicly announced his diagnosis with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare, early-onset form of Alzheimer’s disease. He referred to his condition as an “embuggerance” and became a vocal advocate for dementia research and the right to assisted dying, most famously in his 2010 Richard Dimbleby Lecture, “Shaking Hands With Death,” which argued for facing mortality with logic rather than faith. Though he had been working on Nation prior to his diagnosis, it was the first novel he completed afterward, and he frequently described it as the best book he had ever written. It was not, however, his last: He continued writing for another seven years, producing further Discworld novels, the Long Earth series co-written with Stephen Baxter, and Dodger (2012) before his death in March 2015. His final novel, The Shepherd’s Crown, was published posthumously later that year. Nation thus stands at a key moment between the Pratchett of the great middle period and the elegiac work of his final years.