Brexit has not succeeded in its mission to undo all the cultural ties that unite France and the UK. This is one of the lessons to be learned from the Grand Prix of the 51st Angoulême International Comics Festival (of which Le Monde is a partner). The top prize was awarded to the Francophile British author Posy Simmonds on Wednesday, January 24. This is the first time since the festival's inception in 1974 that the prestigious award has been presented to a British artist.
The 78-year-old illustrator, responsible for the delightful graphic novels Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe and Cassandra Darke (published respectively in 2000, 2008 and 2019 by Denoël in French), was a finalist, alongside Catherine Meurisse and American Daniel Clowes, in the first round of a vote involving a college of comics professionals. She succeeds the winner of the 50th edition, Riad Sattouf, creator of the series L'Arabe du futur and Les Cahiers d'Esther (Allary).
This year's edition of the Angoulême Festival, which runs from January 25 to 28, is crowning an artist who has long worked as a press cartoonist. "This news was unexpected, it came like a ray of sunshine and fills me with joy," Simmonds confided shortly before the award ceremony, which she was unable to attend for health reasons. "Brexit has isolated us a lot from Europe. So this prestigious award makes me feel like family," she added over the phone in elegant English with a hint of French.
"Drawing literature": The title of the exhibition devoted to Simmonds at the Public Information Library (BPI) in Paris's Centre Pompidou in Paris until April 1 perfectly sums up Simmond's unique style. The trilogy of graphic novels revolving around female characters, which the author began with a bang with Gemma Bovery, draws its inspiration from the great texts of European literature: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856) for her first, Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) for Tamara Drewe, and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843) for Cassandra Darke. These works left their mark on this insatiable reader, who also drew much inspiraton from American comics.
For more than 40 years, in the columns of the Guardian newspaper, she veraciously explored the vicissitudes of the British petty bourgeoisie. "Every week, I was focused on a discipline which consisted in filling spaces," she recounted in a tone that was half-laconic, half-nostalgic, as she welcomed Le Monde to her London apartment in November 2023. A keen observer of class relations, Simmonds was a caustic critic of the British daily's readers who, at the time, "belonged to the social-liberal, self-righteous 'cashmere left'." Her name remains attached to the newspaper, which still occasionally calls on her: For example, in 2013, when she commemorated in her unique way the death of former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – the original of this drawing can be seen in the BPI exhibition. In 2021, she was even entrusted with the honors of the front page, on the occasion of the Guardian's 200th anniversary.
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