Who created the Discworld fantasy novel series?

Terry Pratchett created the Discworld fantasy novel series. The series began with The Colour of Magic, published in 1983, and eventually grew to 41 novels written primarily by Pratchett.

Discworld is a comic fantasy setting built around a flat world carried through space on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle. The unusual cosmology provides a framework for satire, wordplay, and stories about recurring characters such as the witches of Lancre, the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork, and Death.

Pratchett’s books often parody familiar fantasy conventions while also examining institutions, class, religion, technology, and prejudice. Although the novels share a world, they are not one continuous quest narrative. Many can be read as connected subseries or as mostly independent stories.

Pratchett published the final Discworld novel, The Shepherd’s Crown, posthumously in 2015. He died in March of that year after living with Alzheimer’s disease.