One of Raymond Briggs's illustrations from The Snowman book Image: Raymond Briggs / Penguinīriggs was an always inquisitive artist who had breathed in the artistic and popular culture of his time, and was most un-British in his willingness to show public vulnerability about his emotional state. Briggs had told Coates he was against the idea, but was later very happy to admit how well the addition had worked. He also told stories against himself at how resistant he had been to suggestions made by his collaborators, including the producer John Coates’s proposal that a scene with Father Christmas should be added in the 1982 animated film adaptation of The Snowman. He penned a column in The Oldie magazine, “Notes from the Sofa”, and his family recalled, following his death, how delighted he had been to be described in a leading article in The Guardian newspaper as an "iconoclastic national treasure”. In later life, Briggs liked to present himself as a curmudgeon, or “grumpy old man”. All Briggs’s books have an underlying empathy-sometimes explicit, sometimes concealed, even to the author, until critics and readers discovered it-for the life, loves and mortality of his working-class Londoner parents. But the barely concealed emotional charge of his children’s tales, and their bucolic charm, acquired a stinging, subversive power when deployed, in an unaltered visual style, in his adult, satirical and autobiographical books, including Gentleman Jim (1980) and When the Wind Blows (1982).Įthel & Ernest (1986), was an affectionate biography of his parents Ethel Bowyer, a lady’s maid turned housewife, and Ernest Briggs, a milkman. Raymond Briggs, the British author and illustrator of the classic children’s books Father Christmas (1973), Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), and The Snowman (1978), died on 9 August, aged 88.īriggs was uneasy at being described as a pioneering graphic novelist-he preferred to describe his creations as “picture books”. ― The Oldie A beloved genius of storytelling and illustration. The book is illustrated with his characteristic understanding of real life. The great author and illustrator takes a funny, sombre, bittersweet approach to old age, with fond thoughts of his grandchildren, parents, childhood and his partner Liz. Nicholas Tucker ― The Times Many congratulations to The Oldie 's Raymond Briggs on his elegiac new book, Time for Lights Out. looks on ageing with a beady but sympathetic eye…and mordant humour all the way through … there are plenty of excellent jokes in this book. Craig Brown ― Mail on Sunday direct and personal … on the tragi-comedy of growing old. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.Ī mesmerising jumble of jokes, drawings and elderly gripes … All human life – and death – is here in this lucky dip of memories and fears, irritations and idle thoughts… has black humour galore …and, as always, Briggs’s drawings have a touch of magic about them, conjuring human beings and their foibles out of a few precious lines. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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