Philip writes in a shed in his garden. He always writes three pages a day making sure that he has written at least a couple of lines on a new page, so that he never has to start with a blank piece of paper. He finds tipping his chair, tapping his desk with a ruler and tying up his fingers with little bits of string useful for concentration!

Philip's father was in the RAF and so he went to eight different schools all over the world before he was 11. In those days, most long-distance travel was by sea, so Philip spent a lot of his childhood on big ships, and he was even given the protection of the seas. Much of his secondary education was in Wales, a country renowned for its love of story-telling, which may have had an influence on Philip's later career.

Philip always loved telling stories, and when he was at school he entertained his friends by reading ghost stories to them - or by making up his own. He started to write his first novel the day after he finished his final exams at Oxford. He thought it would be quite easy but found it was much harder than he had expected.

Philip's first job was as a teacher. He retold the Greek myths and legends to his pupils and also wrote plays for them. Later he adapted some of his plays into books, as in the case of Spring-Heeled Jack, Count Karlstein and The Ruby in the Smoke.

Philip is now the author of over a dozen books, including the prize-winning and best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy that begins with Northern Lights. The third book in the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, won the Whitbread Book of the Year 2001 - the first children's book to win Book of the Year in the history of the award!