Briton Posy Simmonds crowned Grand Prix in Angoulême

2 mins

After the French Riad Sattouf last year, it is a British septuagenarian who is crowned Grand Prix of the city of Angoulême. On the eve of the opening of the international comics festival, voters, comic book authors, chose Posy Simmonds. The author of Gemma Bovery is the first Briton and the fifth woman in 50 years to receive this prize, the most prestigious in the ninth art.

The author, aged 78, was unable to travel to France. But in a thank you message read on stage by her editor, she said: enchanted, surprised, stunned, deeply delighted to receive this honor “. “ It is an honor and a pleasure to join the cohort of previous winners “.

The Englishwoman, already president of the jury of the Angoulême Festival in 2017, is under a discreet exterior.oBritish a formidable observer and moralist of modern life. A satirist who uses drawing to sketch with caustic humor the failings of the bourgeoisie or the intellectual and artistic world. It has nearly thirty titles, including numerous illustrated books for young people.

It was at the major British daily The Guardian that she made her name in 1972 as an illustrator. “ I did not campaign other than through my drawings “, she says. For eight years, Posy Simmonds recounts the existence of a left-wing family who resemble the readers of the newspaper. This daughter of a wealthy farmer demonstrates a great sense of observation, a taste for detail in the service of a caustic look at customs and the contemporary world.

And it is three modern women who will make her known to a wider public and comic book readers: Gemma Bovary, contemporary transposition of Gustave Flaubert’s heroine, then Tamara Drewe, inspired by a novel by the British Thomas Hardy, and finally Cassandra Darke, an unattractive old lady… Three anti-heroines who aspire to conquer their freedom in a world still dominated by men.

(And with AFP)