Raymond Briggs

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Template:Short description Template:About Template:Bots Template:Use British English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox comics creator

Raymond Redvers Briggs Template:Post-nominals (18 January 1934 – 9 August 2022)<ref name=lea>Template:Cite news</ref> was an English illustrator, cartoonist, graphic novelist and author. Achieving critical and popular success among adults and children, he is best known in Britain for his 1978 story The Snowman, a book without words whose cartoon adaptation is televised and whose musical adaptation is staged every Christmas.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Briggs won the 1966 and 1973 Kate Greenaway Medals from the British Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject.<ref name=medal1966/><ref name=medal1973/> For the 50th anniversary of the Medal (1955–2005), a panel named Father Christmas (1973) one of the top-ten winning works, which composed the ballot for a public election of the nation's favourite.<ref name=topten/> For his contribution as a children's illustrator, Briggs was a runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1984.<ref name=andersen/><ref name=ibby-nominee/> He was a patron of the Association of Illustrators.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Early life

Raymond Redvers Briggs was born on 18 January 1934 in Wimbledon, Surrey (now London), to Ernest Redvers Briggs (1900–1971), a milkman, and Ethel Bowyer (1895–1971), a former lady's maid-turned-housewife, who married in 1930.<ref>Debrett's People of Today, ed. Lucy Hume, Debrett's Ltd, 2017, p. 728</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> During the Second World War, he was evacuated to Dorset before returning to London at the end of the war.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Briggs attended Rutlish School, at that time a grammar school, pursued cartooning from an early age and, despite his father's attempts to discourage him from this unprofitable pursuit, attended the Wimbledon School of Art from 1949 to 1953 to study painting, and Central School of Art to study typography.<ref name="encarta">Raymond Briggs Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2009. Template:Webarchive</ref>

From 1953 to 1955, he was a National Service conscript in the Royal Corps of Signals at Catterick, where he was made a draughtsman.<ref name=medal1966/> After this, he returned to study painting at Slade School of Fine Art, graduating in 1957.<ref name=lea/><ref name = Bailey>Template:Cite news</ref>

Career

After briefly pursuing painting, he became a professional illustrator,<ref name=lea/> and soon began working in children's books. In 1958, he illustrated Peter and the Piskies: Cornish Folk and Fairy Tales, a fairy tale anthology by Ruth Manning-Sanders that was published by Oxford University Press. They would collaborate again for the Hamish Hamilton Book of Magical Beasts (Hamilton, 1966).

In 1961, Briggs began teaching illustration part-time at Brighton School of Art, which he continued until 1986;<ref>Briggs, Raymond – MSN Encarta. Template:Webarchive</ref><ref name="raw">Template:Cite web</ref> one of his students was Chris Riddell, who went on to win three Greenaway Medals.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Briggs was a commended runner-up for the 1964 Kate Greenaway Medal (Fee Fi Fo Fum, a collection of nursery rhymes)<ref name=ccsu/>Template:Efn and won the 1966 Medal for illustrating a Hamilton edition of Mother Goose.<ref name=lea/> According to a retrospective presentation by the librarians, The Mother Goose Treasury "is a collection of 408 traditional and well loved poems and nursery rhymes, illustrated with over 800 colour pictures by a young Raymond Briggs".<ref name=medal1966/>

The first three important works that Briggs both wrote and illustrated were in comics format rather than the separate text and illustrations typical of children's books; all three were published by Hamish Hamilton. Father Christmas (1973) and its sequel Father Christmas Goes on Holiday (1975); both feature a curmudgeonly Father Christmas who complains incessantly about the "blooming snow". For the former, he won his second Greenaway.<ref name=lea/> Much later they were jointly adapted as a film titled Father Christmas. The third early Hamilton "comics" was Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), featuring a day in the life of a working class bogeyman.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The Snowman (Hamilton, 1978) was entirely wordless,<ref name=lea/> and illustrated with only pencil crayons.<ref name=briggs/> The work was partly motivated by his previous book; Briggs wrote that "For two years I worked on Fungus, buried amongst muck, slime and words, so... I wanted to do something which was clean, pleasant, fresh and wordless and quick."<ref name=puffin/> For that work Briggs was a Highly Commended runner-up for his third Greenaway Medal.<ref name=ccsu/>Template:Efn An American edition was produced by Random House in the same year, for which Briggs won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, picture book category.<ref name="Boston Globe–Horn Book Award" /> In 1982, it was adapted by British TV channel Channel 4 as an animated cartoon, with a short narrated introduction by David Bowie.<ref name="david bowie - the snowman">Template:Citation</ref> It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1982, and has since been shown every year on British television (except 1984).<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> On Christmas Eve 2012 the 30th anniversary of the original was marked by the airing of the sequel The Snowman and the Snowdog.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Briggs continued to work in a similar format, but with more adult content, in Gentleman Jim (1980), a sombre look at the working class trials of Jim and Hilda Bloggs, closely based on his parents. When the Wind Blows (1982) confronted the trusting, optimistic Bloggs couple with the horror of nuclear war, and was praised in the House of Commons for its timeliness and originality. The topic was inspired after Briggs watched a Panorama documentary on nuclear contingency planning,<ref name="raw" /> and the dense format of the page was inspired by a Swiss publisher's miniature version of Father Christmas.<ref name=briggs1/> This book was turned into a two-handed radio play with Peter Sallis in the male lead role, and subsequently an animated film, featuring John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft.<ref>Template:IMDb title. Confirmed 4 December 2012.</ref> The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984) was a denunciation of the Falklands War.<ref name = Times>Template:Cite news</ref>

Personal life and death

Briggs's wife Jean Taprell Clarke, who had schizophrenia, died from leukaemia in 1973, two years after his parents' death. They did not have any children.<ref name="guardian dec 2019">Template:Cite news</ref>

At the end of his life, Briggs lived in a small house in Westmeston, Sussex.<ref name = Times/><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> His long-term partner, Liz, died in October 2015 having had Parkinson's disease. Briggs continued to work on writing and illustrating books.<ref name=cooke/>

Briggs died of pneumonia at Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton on 9 August 2022, aged 88.<ref name="lea" /><ref name = Bailey/>

He is buried in East Chiltington.

Awards and honours

Briggs won the 1992 Kurt Maschler Award, or the "Emil", both for writing and for illustrating The Man, a short graphic novel featuring a boy and a homunculus. The award annually recognised one British children's book for integration of text and illustration.<ref name=bizland/> His graphic novel Ethel & Ernest, which portrayed his parents' 41-year marriage, won Best Illustrated Book in the 1999 British Book Awards. In 2016, it was turned into a hand-drawn animated film.<ref name=AnMag /> In 2012, he was the first person to be inducted into the British Comic Awards Hall of Fame.<ref name="britishcomicawards.com">Template:Cite web</ref>

In 2014, Briggs received the Phoenix Picture Book Award from the Children's Literature Association for The Bear (1994). The award committee stated:

With surprising page-turns, felicitous pauses, and pitch-perfect dialogue, Briggs renders the drama and humour of child–adult and child–bear relations, while questioning the nature of imagination and reality. As a picture book presented in graphic novel format, Briggs's work was ground-breaking when first published and remains cutting edge twenty years later in its creative unity of text and picture.<ref name=PA>ChLA Newsletter Template:Webarchive, Vol. 20, Issue 2 (Autumn 2013)]. pp. 6–7. Retrieved 2014-07-12.</ref>

The biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award conferred by the International Board on Books for Young People is the highest recognition available to a writer or illustrator of children's books. Briggs was one of two runners-up for the illustration award in 1984.<ref name=andersen/><ref name=ibby-nominee/>

He also won several awards for particular works.<ref name=puffin/><ref name=BCL/>

The National Portrait Gallery, London, holds several photographic portraits of Briggs in its permanent collection.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Briggs was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to literature.<ref>Template:London Gazette</ref> A book about his life's work entitled Raymond Briggs: The Illustrators was written by Nicolette Jones and published in 2020.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Selected works

Adaptations

See also

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Explanatory notes

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References

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Further reading

  • Barbara Baker, The Way We Write, (London: Continuum, 2006) Template:ISBN
  • Nicolette Jones, Raymond Briggs: Blooming Books (Jonathan Cape, 2003). Extracts from the published works of Briggs with text commentary by Jones.
  • Richard Kilborn, The Multi-Media Melting Pot: Marketing "When the Wind Blows" (Comedia, 1986)
  • D. Martin, "Raymond Briggs", in Douglas Martin, The Telling Line: Essays on Fifteen Contemporary Book Illustrators (Julia MacRae Books, 1989), pp. 227–42
  • Elaine Moss, "Raymond Briggs: On British attitudes to the strip cartoon and children's book illustration", Signal (1979 January)
  • Anita Silvey (editor), The Essential Guide to Children's Books and Their Creators (Mariner Books, 2002) Template:ISBN

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