Sir Terry Pratchett wins Wodehouse book prize

Best-selling novelist Sir Terry Pratchett has a new honour to go
with the Bafta he won at the weekend: a pig named after one of his
books.

The 64-year-old writer was given the unusual award after his novel Snuff won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.

He will accept the prize, which includes a case of champagne, at next week's Hay Festival.

It is the first time Pratchett has won the prize, named in honour of Jeeves and Wooster creator PG Wodehouse, despite being shortlisted on three previous occasions.

Prize judge Peter Florence said: "I am thrilled he's won in this 25th anniversary year of the festival. He's consistently funny, inventive and with an acute, satirical view of the world."

Pratchett, who picked up a TV Bafta on Sunday for his assisted suicide documentary Choosing To Die, joins previous winners such as Ian McEwan and Gary Shteyngart.

Snuff is his 50th book and the 39th in the series of Discworld novels: comic stories set in a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the back of a giant turtle.

PA