Rhianna Pratchett, the Tomb Raider writer adapting The Wee Free Men as a graphic novel

Rhianna Pratchett

Photo: Official GDC / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 30, 1976 Rowberrow, Somerset, England
Occupation	Writer
Awards	Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award, Best Videogame Script · European Women in Games Hall of Fame · Writers Guild of America Award, Outstanding Achievement in Video Game Writing · Golden Romics

In REKA, a young woman becomes the apprentice of Baba Jaga and learns the old trade of herbs, potions and quiet witchery in a cottage that walks on chicken legs. The finished game reached Steam this week after more than two years in Early Access, and its lead writer is Rhianna Pratchett, the English writer who gave a younger, far more breakable Lara Croft her voice in the rebooted Tomb Raider. For someone whose childhood was full of fictional witches, the subject fits.

Her next project takes her closer to those witches than she has ever gone. She is adapting The Wee Free Men, the novel in which her father, Terry Pratchett, introduced the young witch Tiffany Aching, as a graphic novel for Puffin, part of a new Discworld graphic novel line. “Growing up in Wiltshire, England’s ‘Chalk Country’, and having a shepherdess grandmother makes it a very personal book for me,” she said when the project was announced, calling it one of her favourite books by her father. In the spring the Romics festival in Rome gave her its Golden Romics award, an honour for a career spent between video games and comics.

Pratchett was born on 30 December 1976, the daughter of Terry Pratchett and Lyn Purves. She studied journalism at the London College of Printing and began by reviewing games for Minx magazine. She then moved to PC Zone, rising from editorial assistant and staff writer to section editor, and wrote for The Guardian, among other publications.

In 2002 she crossed over to the other side, writing for Beyond Divinity at Larian Studios in Belgium, and she also wrote a novella to accompany the game. Her first major credit followed in 2007 with Heavenly Sword for Ninja Theory, a story she shared with Tameem Antoniades and Andy Serkis that brought her a BAFTA nomination. The same year came Overlord, a comedy about being the villain, which won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award for Best Videogame Script in 2008. She went on to write most of its sequels and spin-offs, from Overlord II to Overlord: Fellowship of Evil.

Mirror’s Edge, released by DICE in 2008, gave her a different problem: a first-person game about a courier running across the rooftops of a sterile city, where the story had to keep pace with the player’s feet. She wrote the game and a six-issue Mirror’s Edge miniseries for DC Comics in the same year. Since then she has worked in comics as steadily as in games, writing for Dark Horse, Dynamite, Marvel and Kodansha, including an issue of Legends of Red Sonja.

The biggest test came with Crystal Dynamics. As lead writer on Tomb Raider in 2013, she rebuilt Lara Croft as a frightened young woman who becomes a survivor, an origin story that turned one of gaming’s most cartoonish icons into a character players could worry about. The same year, she was inducted into the European Women in Games Hall of Fame. She wrote the sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and in February 2016 it won the Writers Guild of America award for Outstanding Achievement in Video Game Writing, ahead of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Pillars of Eternity and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. She carried Lara into print as well, with Tomb Raider: The Beginning and issues seven to eighteen of the Dark Horse Tomb Raider comic.

Books came later, and on her own terms. In 2020 Scholastic published Crystal of Storms, her contribution to the revived Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, and she became the first woman to write one of its adventures. The reader joins the Sky Watch, guardians of the floating archipelago of Pangaria, and must raise a fallen island from the Ocean of Tempests. Pratchett described it as a little lighter than other entries, with a police procedural element new to that world. A year later she and Andi Ewington published Campaigns & Companions: The Complete Roleplaying Guide for Pets with Rebellion.

Then, at last, Discworld. Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch, written with the children’s author Gabrielle Kent and illustrated by Paul Kidby, was published by Penguin in November 2023 to mark twenty years of the character. It presents itself as a handbook compiled by Tiffany, with notes in the margins from Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Miss Tick and Rob Anybody. It is also the first Discworld book set after The Shepherd’s Crown, the final novel. Indira Varma, who narrates the Tiffany Aching audiobooks, read it, and Pratchett herself voiced Mrs Letice Earwig. A US edition from HarperCollins followed in 2025.

That book came after years of quieter work as the keeper of her father’s legacy. Since 2012 she has been a co-director of Narrativia, the company that holds the multimedia rights to Terry Pratchett’s work. After his death in 2015, she announced that The Shepherd’s Crown would be the last Discworld novel and that no unfinished work would be published. She had already written a screenplay of The Wee Free Men, completed in 2014, which has never been made. In 2019 she made clear that she had not been involved in the television series The Watch for many years. In December 2023 she presented her first radio series, Mythical Creatures, ten episodes for BBC Radio 4 on the beasts of British folklore.

That is why her name matters beyond the games she has written. Few writers have moved so easily between the controller, the comic panel and the printed page, and fewer still have had to do it while guarding one of the most loved bodies of work in British fantasy. She has guarded that work by refusing more than she has accepted. The Discworld books she has chosen to write, first a witch’s handbook and now the graphic novel of The Wee Free Men, bring her back to the chalk country of her childhood. A witch in a walking cottage is one more sign that she has never really left it.

Tags: writers, tomb raider, REKA, Rhianna Pratchett, Crystal of Storms, Mirror's Edge