Unseen Academicals characters

First appears in chapter 4

Archchancellor of Unseen University: loud, hearty, fond of the outdoors and of enormous meals, and much shrewder than his manner suggests. He runs a faculty of elderly wizards mainly by out-shouting them, and reacts to an institutional crisis by charging at it.

First appears in chapter 6

The university's Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic and the only member of the faculty who reads the paperwork, which is why he ends up holding most of the jobs nobody else wants. Overworked, precise, and quietly despairing of his colleagues.

First appears in chapter 5

The woman who runs the Night Kitchen at Unseen University, celebrated for her pies and feared for her opinions. Fiercely competent, fiercely protective of the people she has decided are hers, and convinced that her place in the world is settled and small. She reads cheap romances, disapproves of almost everything, and does more work than anyone notices.

First appears in chapter 5

A young woman who works alongside Glenda in the Night Kitchen: extraordinarily beautiful, entirely uninterested in thinking hard about anything, and from a family of devoted football supporters in Dolly Sisters. Good-natured and easily led, she has never been offered any future except the one everyone around her already has.

First appears in chapter 7

A young man who works in the university's candle vats, son of the most famous street footballer the city ever produced. Cocky, idle, and remarkably skilful with a battered tin can, he promised his mother he would never play football and has kept to it. He is the first person to treat the strange new worker beside him as a friend.

First appears in chapter 7

A short, oddly built, exhaustively polite young man who has appeared in the candle vats with no explanation and an alarming quantity of learning: philosophy, poetry, metallurgy, anatomy, and languages, all delivered apologetically. He works constantly, asks nothing for himself, and is preoccupied above all with the question of whether he has any worth.

First appears in chapter 9

Head of the university's Department of Post-Mortem Communications, whose job description formally permits a small amount of sinister behaviour, which he takes very seriously. He owns a skull-topped staff and enjoys himself.

First appears in chapter 13

The Candle Knave, in charge of the vats where Trev and Nutt work, and jealous of a job nobody else wants. He explains at length that everything was better before and that the dribbling of candles is a craft not to be meddled with.

First appears in chapter 14

The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, who governs the city by understanding exactly what its people will do next and arranging matters so that it suits him. He has decided that the city's murderous street football is a problem best solved by giving it rules, respectability, and somewhere to go.

First appears in chapter 14

Lord Vetinari's personal secretary, quiet, colourless, and indispensable, with an enthusiasm for stationery and a memory for everything.

First appears in chapter 20

A university porter of the old school, devoted to keeping things exactly as they have always been and to keeping the wrong sort of person out. His view of who counts as the wrong sort is broad and firmly held.

First appears in chapter 25

A vicious young man from Dimwell who leads a gang of football supporters and treats the game as an excuse for violence. He has known Trev for years, hates him, and hates the idea of a football with rules in it even more.

First appears in chapter 43

A visiting wizard from Genua, brilliantly qualified, universally admired, and by some distance the best natural athlete the university has ever had on its books.

First appears in chapter 45

A dwarf designer of erratic habits, boundless energy, and an eye for what a person could become rather than what they presently are. He works in micromail, drinks too much, talks constantly, and has come a very long way from wherever he started.

First appears in chapter 45

The formidable dwarf proprietor of the fashion house that Pepe designs for, a shrewd businesswoman who understands that dwarf clothing has become a matter of politics as well as money.

First appears in chapter 53

The Low King of the Dwarfs, in the city on business, and obliged to balance the traditionalists of his own people against the dwarfs who have made new lives above ground.