Philip Pullman

Wrote His Dark Materials partly as an answer to C. S. Lewis, whose Narnia he has called religious propaganda that punishes a girl for growing up.

Lyra's world has daemons, animal companions carrying a person's soul on the outside, which is one of the great inventions in children's fiction. The trilogy takes on the Authority, a senile god, and ends with two children choosing separation over a paradise built on a lie. The Amber Spyglass won the Whitbread Book of the Year, the first children's book to take the general prize.

The Book of Dust returned to Lyra decades later, in both directions. Pullman is a combative public atheist and an unusually old-fashioned storyteller at the same time, and the second thing is why the first one lands.