Philip Pullman is an award-winning writer who has won critical aclaim. His novel, Northern Lights (the first in the His Dark Materials trilogy) was published in the US as an adult novel under the title The Golden Compass. In the UK, Northern Lights won the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children's Fiction Award and the Children's Book of the Year Award, while in the US it was one of four honor children's books at the ABBY awards. Previous novels have included The Ruby in the Smoke, winner of the International Reading Association Award and recommended in the New York Times Parents Guide to the Best Books for Children, and Tiger in the Well, shortlisted for the Guardian Award. A former teacher, Philip Pullman writes in a garden shed at the bottom of his garden near Oxford, England. A passionate advocate of children's literature he has said " . . . stories are vital. There's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy, and there's a hunger for stories in all of us."