50 free Terry Pratchett trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Terry Pratchett wrote 41 Discworld novels, sold more than 100 million books in 43 languages and was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s, all while insisting that chapters were an unnecessary stopping point. He started as a trainee journalist on the Bucks Free Press at 17, wrote children's stories there as Uncle Jim, and published The Colour of Magic in 1983 in a first printing of just 506 copies. These 50 questions cover the whole career: the Beaconsfield library he credited with his education, the nuclear press-officer job he took right after Three Mile Island, the 'Patrick Kearns' stories nobody traced to him until 2023, the Carnegie Medal for The Amazing Maurice, the knighthood and the sword he forged himself, and the steamroller that crushed his hard drive. Discworld and Good Omens get their share too: Great A'Tuin, octarine, Death's small caps, the Luggage, Agnes Nutter and the Sky One films. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and each explanation adds one more detail. Play it solo, or print it for a book-club night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many Discworld novels did Terry Pratchett publish between 1983 and 2015?
41
The last, The Shepherd's Crown, came out five months after his death.
Q 02Which novel was Pratchett's first, published in 1971?
The Carpet People
He substantially rewrote it for a 1992 re-release; the original carried his own illustrations.
Q 03How many copies were in the first British printing of The Colour of Magic?
506
Pratchett described the book as doing for fantasy what Blazing Saddles did for Westerns.
Q 04Which novel was the final Discworld book, published five months after Pratchett died?
The Shepherd's Crown
It closed the Tiffany Aching sequence in August 2015.
Q 05In which Buckinghamshire town was Pratchett born in 1948?
Beaconsfield
He credited his education to the town's public library rather than to school.
Q 06In his Who's Who entry, Pratchett credited his education to what?
Beaconsfield Public Library
He called himself a 'non-descript' student and was bullied at primary school for speech impediments.
Q 07What did the young Pratchett want to be before he found he lacked the maths?
An astronomer
He later built an observatory in his back garden and appeared on The Sky at Night.
Q 08At what age did Pratchett's story "The Hades Business" appear in his school magazine?
13
It was published commercially two years later, when he was 15.
Q 09Under what name did Pratchett write children's stories for the Bucks Free Press?
Uncle Jim
The first ran on 8 October 1965; he admitted he struggled with door-step interviews.
Q 10In which year were Pratchett's "Patrick Kearns" newspaper stories finally traced to him?
2023
Kearns was his mother's maiden name; the stories were collected as A Stroke of the Pen.
Q 11In 1979 Pratchett became press officer for a region containing three what?
Nuclear power stations
He joked about his 'impeccable timing', so soon after Three Mile Island.
Q 12Pratchett quit his day job in 1987 after finishing which Discworld novel?
Mort
It was the fourth Discworld book; from then on he aimed at 1,000 words a day.
Q 13Pratchett was the UK's best-selling author of which decade?
The 1990s
The Times rated him the top-selling and highest-earning UK author in 1996.
Pratchett won the 2001 Carnegie Medal for which book?
Q 21Pratchett died on 12 March 2015 at what age?
66
His humanist funeral was held in Salisbury later that month.
Q 22What prefix began the tribute HTTP header "GNU Terry Pratchett" added to websites?
X-Clacks-Overhead
It references Going Postal, where the clacks semaphore repeats a dead son's name forever.
Q 23What did Pratchett ask to be done to anything he was working on when he died?
Crushed by a steamroller
Rob Wilkins carried it out in 2017 at the Great Dorset Steam Fair.
Where was Pratchett's hard drive crushed in 2017?
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
It was the first Discworld book marketed for children.
Q 15Pratchett was knighted for services to literature in which year?
2009
He had been made an OBE in 1998 and said he was 'mightily chuffed'.
Q 16After his knighthood, what did Pratchett make from iron he dug up near his home?
A sword
He believed a knight should have one; it was forged in 2010.
Q 17In December 2007 Pratchett announced he had been diagnosed with what?
Early-onset Alzheimer's
He called it an 'embuggerance' and asked people to 'keep things cheerful'.
Q 18What word did Pratchett use for his diagnosis in a radio interview?
Embuggerance
He said he would only accept help from 'very high-end experts in brain chemistry'.
Q 19How much did Pratchett donate to the Alzheimer's Research Trust in March 2008?
£494,000
He was shocked that Alzheimer's research received just 3% of cancer-research funding.
Q 20Who read the main text of Pratchett's 2010 Dimbleby Lecture, Shaking Hands With Death?
Tony Robinson
Pratchett introduced it himself but his condition made reading difficult.
Great Dorset Steam Fair
Wilkins said Pratchett left 'an awful lot' of unfinished writing, including ten known titles.
Q 25Which of Pratchett's novels ranked highest, at number 65, in the BBC's 2003 Big Read?
Mort
Only he and Charles Dickens had five books in the Top 100.
Q 26Pratchett's Discworld rests on four elephants standing on what?
A giant turtle
A fossil sea-turtle, Psephophorus terrypratchetti, was named for him in 1995.
Q 27What is the name of the huge turtle that swims through space carrying the Disc?
Great A'Tuin
The nation of Krull tried to launch a capsule over the Disc's edge to learn its sex.
Q 28Fans petitioned to name element 117 after which Discworld colour?
Octarine
The proposed symbol was Oc, pronounced 'ook'; the element became tennessine.
Q 29How is the character Death's dialogue set in Pratchett's books?
Small capitals
It carries no quotation marks; characters say his voice reaches their minds without a sound.
Q 30What is the name of Death's pale horse in the Discworld novels?
Binky
Death appears in every novel except The Wee Free Men and Snuff.