Britain’s Posy Simmonds just lately received the Grand Prix on the Angouleme comics competition in France, thought-about the world’s most prestigious awards for graphic novelists.
A pioneer of the shape, her mild however spicy humour has lengthy charmed the world of graphic novels, even when she is higher referred to as a press cartoonist in Britain.
The high prize on the Angouleme International Comics Festival, broadly seen because the trade’s most illustrious occasion, rewards her total physique of labor which incorporates a number of youngsters’s books and extra grownup fare reminiscent of Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe, each cheeky reworkings of nineteenth century novels.
Simmonds, 78, is a long-time Francophile who studied on the Sorbonne in Paris, however she continued to stay in Britain regardless of its relative lack of affection for graphic novels.
She is one of many few girls to break via within the style from Britain, beginning as a press cartoonist for The Sun and later becoming a member of The Guardian.
Simmonds received press cartoonist of the 12 months in 1981, when she additionally received worldwide popularity of True Love, an avant-garde graphic novel that was a kind of precursor to the Bridget Jones novels.
“We did not but name it a graphic novel,” she mentioned in an interview with the Pompidou Centre in Paris for a retrospective opening on April 1.
“I instructed myself I used to be going to write a romance … however my imaginative and prescient of affection is fairly ironic.”
Reimagining classics
Simmonds, whose actual identify is Rosemary Elizabeth, grew up surrounded by books within the English countryside.
“Comics weren’t actually permitted of at house, however my mother and father allowed them so long as we continued to learn novels,” she mentioned.
Gemma Bovery (1999) is thought-about an iconoclastic masterpiece, with a fancy plot delivered in very dense textual content, reimagining the bored heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovery.
Tamara Drewe (2007) equally transposed Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd to the fashionable day, whereas Cassandra Darke (2018) was a retelling of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
In Britain, critics typically deal with her as a literary novelist, regardless of her protestations that graphic novels are a definite artwork type.
In France, some of the avid comic-consuming nations on this planet, she has lengthy been a star and she or he chaired the jury on the Angouleme competition in 2017.
The Grand Prix is chosen by fellow writers and artists, who create a shortlist of three artists.
For the fifth time, France’s Catherine Meurisse made the shortlist with out profitable. – AFP
