Cartoonist Simmonds becomes first Briton to win French festival prize
A BRITISH cartoonist has won a top international honour.
Posy Simmonds is only the fifth woman and the first Briton to win the grand prix at France's worldfamous Angoulême comics festival, an honour she is thrilled with – even if toothache prevented her from collecting her prize.
Simmonds’s satirical observations on modern British society, interweaving illustration with long literary texts, are held to have redefined the graphic novel genre.
She said of the award: “I was gobsmacked – époustouflée, as you would say in French. It’s extraordinary because if you’re writing or drawing, you work in a room on your own, and it’s then very extraordinary when the book, or your work, or you are given a lot of exposure.”
Simmonds began as a newspaper illustrator and started a weekly comic strip for The Guardian in the 1970s.
Her satire, Gemma Bovery, an updated reworking of the classic Madame Bovary by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert set among English expatriates in Normandy, was serialised by The Guardian in the 1990s.
Later, in 2005-2006, Simmonds’s Guardian series, Tamara Drewe, referenced Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd and explored the contrast between a country writers’ retreat and the reality of local rural life. Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe were both published as graphic novels and later turned into feature films.
Simmonds, 78, whose work ran in The Guardian from the 1970s, is only the fourth woman to win the Grand Prix at the International Comics festival in Angoulême, which has been running for more than 50 years.
“I always think in a perfect world, the gender of a prize winner shouldn’t be remarkable,” Simmonds said. “But it’s an imperfect world and the comics and bande dessinée world has always been a masculine milieu, a bit of a boys’ club. But, bit by bit, especially over the last decade, women have infiltrated it, so I’m pleased to be one of them, of course.”
Simmonds has a big following in France, where she is known as “the queen of the British graphic novel” and has been described as a “subtle satirist” of modern times.
Simmonds grew up in Berkshire, but her mother’s family had Huguenot roots. At 17, she studied French at the Sorbonne, and said France had influenced her.