Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling

By Philip Pullman

From the internationally best-selling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, a spellbinding journey into the secrets of his art--the narratives that have shaped his vision, his experience of writing, and the keys to mastering the art of storytelling.

One of the most highly acclaimed and best-selling authors of our time now gives us a book that charts the history of his own enchantment with story--from his own books to those of Blake, Milton, Dickens, and the Brothers Grimm, among others--and delves into the role of story in education, religion, and science. At once personal and wide-ranging, Daemon Voices is both a revelation of the writing mind and the methods of a great contemporary master, and a fascinating exploration of storytelling itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9780525521181

Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman (b. 1946) is one of the world’s most acclaimed children’s authors, his bold, brilliant books having set new parameters for what children’s writing can say and do. He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy, installments of which have won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. In 2003, the trilogy came third in the BBC’s Big Read competition to find the nation’s favorite book, and in 2005 he was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, an international prize for children’s literature. In 2007, Northern Lights became a major Hollywood film, The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. Pullman has published nearly twenty books, and when he’s not writing he likes to play the piano (badly), draw, and make things out of wood.

Reviews for Daemon Voices

[sandyamcpherson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Caveat: An extremely personal perspective on Pullman's writerly advice and insights.Very philosophical and scholarly. However: oh-so-worthy. As an informative chronicle on writing, the book failed in that specific narrative.The references to authors such as Milton, Blake, and so forth came across as preachy and just a bit smug. There were some unattractive overtones where Pullman pulled out what I could only wonder as "unperceptive white privilege", for want of a better descriptor. I suspect that some of the glaring flaws in this book are editorial faults. The essays drew heavily on a wide variety of lectures, speeches and short non-fiction articles that were published elsewhere. As a compendium, this arrangement did not make for an interesting insight on writing or storytelling. I suspect that, individually, the public-speaking material was probably very engaging for the live audience. These were not essays penned for a book, and made for too much repetition gathered together. An additional aspect which the editor(s) seem to have ignored: a combination of the different talks and lectures brought forward a feeling that Philip Pullman is rather full of himself. And that perception may very well reflect reading so many 'essays' on his opinions.

[charlotteburt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Much more scholarly than I was expecting with frequent references to William Blake and Milton. I learned a lot