Shipping Lines will be in addition to Liverpool ' s acclaimed independent Writing on the Wall festival which takes place annually in April.
Most of the programme will be based at the university itself, but organisers are looking at whether some events can take place in other city venues.
Prof Birch added: "We want the festival to be a way in which people who aren't professional literary types can encounter different kinds of writers. "Philip Pullman's writing has been enormously popular but it's also profoundly academic and engages with the great literary traditions of Milton and Blake."
ECHO Essentials .
Philip Pullman was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe and Australia, before his family settled in North Wales.
* His first children's book was Count Karlstein (1982), followed by The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), the first in a quartet of books featuring the young Victorian adventurer, Sally Lockhart.
* He is most famous for the trilogy His Dark Materials, which has won many awards including the Whitbread prize - the first time it has ever been awarded to a children's book. . The first of the trilogy, Northern Lights - known as The Golden Compass in America, is being made into a film which is due for release in 2007.
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