Posy Simmonds wins the Angouleme comics award. First Briton to gain recognition

2024-01-30 01:17:00

Time.news – Posy Simmonds is just there fifth woman and first Briton to win the Grand Prix at the prestigious French comics festival in Angouleme, an honor she is thrilled about, even if toothache prevented her from collecting it in person.

Cartoons and comics have long been “a men’s club, and certainly in recent decades the women have infiltrated it. Of course I am very happy to be one of them,” she told AFP this week.

Simmonds, 78 years old, She is best known in Britain for her work on The Guardian newspaper and for her gentle satire of the English middle class.

In France, however, she became famous for “Gemma Bovery” (1999), considered an iconoclastic masterpiece, with a complex plot in a very dense text, which reimagines the bored heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”.

The work was initially commissioned by The Guardian, who asked her for 100 episodes. But feeling he still had much to say, Simmonds decided to accompany her drawings with numerous long texts.

This will become her trademark in later graphic novels, such as “Tamara Drewe” or “Cassandra Darke”.

Simmonds works in a small room in her 12th-floor flat in central London, filled with books, pencils and drawings, far from the countryside where she grew up.

Afp – Gemma Bovary – Posy Simmonds

The Angouleme International Comics Festival in southwestern France is considered the industry’s most illustrious event. Although she was unable to come to France for the announcement, the longtime Francophile, who studied at the Sorbonne, confesses that she finds it “extraordinary” that she is the first Briton to win the award.

“First of all I was amazed, I said ‘wow’… and then of course I was very happy,” she told AFP.

Simmonds claims that Britain lags behind France in interest in comics or BD (“comics“), as they are called.

“I always remember going to Paris and being at the FNAC (bookstore), where there were adults reading BDs and children at their feet reading BDs. I thought this is just incredible,” she said.

A constant in her work are strong female characters, whether it is Gemma, an English woman who cheats on her husband in the Normandy countryside, or Cassandra, an irascible elderly Londoner who defends herself with her nails and with teeth from adversity.