13 March 2015 - Terry Pratchett dies aged 66
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Terry Pratchett, Discworld series author, dies aged 66
Richard Lea and Caroline Davies (The Guardian)
The writer Terry Pratchett, who took millions of readers on a madcap journey to the universe of Discworld, has died aged 66.
The announcement came in typically irreverent manner on the author’s Twitter feed, with a series of tweets beginning in the voice of his character, Death: “AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.”
“Terry took Death’s arm,” the following tweet read, “and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.”
Pratchett’s publisher, Larry Finlay, paid tribute to one of the world’s “brightest, sharpest minds”.
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Discworld
Editorial (The Independent)
Sir Terry Pratchett, who died today, occasionally received letters from fans who had a terminal illness. They hoped, so he reported, that the Death they would meet might resemble his own much-loved Reaper. Pratchett imagined Death as a curious, rather kindly figure, a lover of cats and curry, often perplexed by humanity’s taste for self-delusion and always with a taste for EXPRESSING HIMSELF IN CAPITALS.
Over the 40 books of his Discworld series, Pratchett proved that no subject lay beyond the reach of his own, incomparable brand of comic fantasy – and certainly not the end of life. Diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2007, he explored his own condition with the quizzical humour, intellectual zest and sheer generosity of spirit that marked his fiction.
Over three decades, the Discworld canon rose into a self-sufficient universe of madcap ingenuity. In its city-state of Ankh-Morpork, the conventions of sorcery and science fiction could shed light on almost every facet of our world – from banking to politics, crime to the media. He was witty, and zany, and topical, and wise: not in discrete chunks, but all at once.
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Alzheimer
Staff (BBC News)
In August 2007, it was reported Sir Terry had suffered a stroke, but the following December he announced that he had been diagnosed with a very rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease which, he said, "lay behind this year's phantom stroke".
Terry Pratchett Sir Terry approached his Alzheimer's diagnosis with a pragmatic sense of humour
Knighted in 2009, he said: "It would appear to me that me getting up and saying 'I've got Alzheimer's', it did shake people."
"The thing about Alzheimer's is there are few families that haven't been touched by the disease.
"People come up to me and talk about it and burst into tears; there's far more awareness about it and that was really what I hoped was going to happen."
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Byatt
Bruce Weber (The New York Times)
Often spiced with shrewd and sometimes wryly stinging references to literary genres, from fairy tales to Elizabethan drama, his books have sold 85 million copies worldwide, according to his publisher. And though Mr. Pratchett may have suffered from the general indifference of literary critics to the fantasy genre, on the occasions when serious minds took his work seriously, they tended to validate his legitimate literary standing.
In 2003, the novelist A. S. Byatt wrote that critics were paying attention to the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling but rarely to other fantasists.
“They do not now review the great Terry Pratchett,” Ms. Byatt wrote, “whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.”
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"13 March 2015 - Terry Pratchett dies aged 66 ", La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), mars 2015. Consulté le 24/04/2024. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/key-story/archives-revue-de-presse-2015/13-march-2015-terry-pratchett-dies-aged-66-