Pratchett Clarifies Remarks Regarding Rowling

In a follow-up to the recent kerfluffle stemming from his letter to the Times regarding their story on J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett visited alt.fan.harry-potter this week. He said:

“I don’t have any problem at all with her rise, only with such third-party silliness, which insults good authors who wrote great books at a time, not long ago, when advances were always low and hype was unknown.
No, I do not think these words originated with her. It’s self-evident in the article that they are the voice of the interviewer, who is very visible in the piece. The tone and presentation make it obvious. Read the paragraph beginning ‘It is precisely Rowling’s lack of sentimentality…’ He’s giving us *his* opinion, and the guy just had a nice line he wanted to use.”

In a separate post, he wrote, “Grossman’s airy dismissal of the genre hitherto, to suggest that JKR had brought fresh air where all had hitherto been fusty, was my prime reason for the letter.”

Neil Gaiman, who collaborated with Terry Pratchett on Good Omens, also weighed in on his blog, saying, “I didn’t see it as a swipe at Ms Rowling, though, but as a swipe against lazy journalists — but “Pratchett Anger At Shoddy Journalism” is a much less exciting headline than the one the BBC came up with.”

Incidentally, Pratchett and Rowling share common territory: last week The Scotsman noted that a study by Cambridge-based internet monitoring company Envisional calculated that the top three authors victimized by piratical translations of their books were Stephen King, J.K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett.