The Bear

Product Information

Briggs won the 1992 Kurt Maschler Award, or the "Emil", both for writing and for illustrating The Man, a short graphic novel featuring a boy and a homunculus. The award annually recognised one British children's book for integration of text and illustration. [32] His graphic novel Ethel & Ernest, which portrayed his parents' 41-year marriage, won Best Illustrated Book in the 1999 British Book Awards. In 2016, it was turned into a hand-drawn animated film. [33] In 2012, he was the first person to be inducted into the British Comic Awards Hall of Fame. [34] a b c (Greenaway Winner 1973). Living Archive: Celebrating the Carnegie and Greenaway Winners. CILIP. Retrieved 14 July 2012. Briggs received a thorough professional schooling, first at Wimbledon School of Art (now Wimbledon College of Art), then at Central School of Art in London, the Royal Corps of Signals—for his national service, where he was put to work drawing diagrams for electric circuitry—and the Slade School of Art, University College London. At the Slade he overlapped with fellow students including the late Paula Rego and Victor Willing, and graduated in 1957, aged 23. Briggs put his meticulous research skills to use, mining historical dictionaries for redundant words that might give authenticity to his characters, including the more unsavoury bodily emissions of Fungus the Bogeyman.

Briggs had a stable childhood in the 1930s and 40s, growing up in a terraced house in Ashen Grove, Wimbledon Park, southwest London. The house and its old-fashioned kitchen, scullery and outside lavatory feature repeatedly in Briggs’s work, from Father Christmas onwards—where Briggs based the title character, and his “blooming” cursing at the anti-social hours and conditions of his work, on the grind of his father Ernest’s labour, delivering milk to people’s doorsteps at all hours and in all weathers. In the half-century following his parents’ death in 1971, Briggs made regular return visits to the house, whose later owners kept it largely as Ethel and Ernest had left it, down to the 1930s wallpaper that still lined the inside of a hallway cupboard. Big kid, 'old git' and still in the rudest of health". Rachel Cooke. The Observer. 10 August 2008. Confirmed 4 December 2012. The Mother Goose Treasury ( Hamilton, 1966), from Mother Goose – winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal [3] The National Portrait Gallery, London, holds several photographic portraits of Briggs in its permanent collection. [41] a b "Hans Christian Andersen Awards". International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY). Retrieved 28 July 2013.

Get to know us

Briggs stated that he used to be a staunch supporter of the Labour Party, although he lost faith in the party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. [31] Briggs was uneasy at being described as a pioneering graphic novelist—he preferred to describe his creations as “picture books”. 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). During the 1939-45 conflict, Briggs was evacuated, like three million other city-dwelling children, to the countryside, in his case to life on a farm in Dorset. His books are freighted with visual and verbal memories of the conflict, from the Anderson bomb shelter adopted for other uses in Father Christmas; to the nostalgia of the lead characters in When the Wind Blows, his anti-war satire on the dangers of nuclear apocalypse, for how they had got by during "the war". Walker, Emily (24 December 2010). "Snowman author says: "I hate Christmas" (From The Argus)". Theargus.co.uk . Retrieved 23 July 2012. Father Christmas | | raymond briggs | raymond briggs | V&A Explore The Collections". Victoria and Albert Museum: Explore the Collections . Retrieved 11 August 2022.

Briggs's mature style, favouring crayon as a medium over earlier experiments in watercolour, has a fine-textured patina and muted palette that is as distinctive and unmistakable as the strongly outlined, vividly coloured images of two internationally popular Francophone comic-book series—Hergé’s Tintin adventures (starting in 1929) and René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Asterix books (1959-2015)—both of which are reminiscent of the style and primary tones of the 19th-century posters and short books of the French publisher Imageries d’Epinal. a b c d e f g h i j Lea, Richard (10 August 2022). "Snowman author Raymond Briggs dies aged 88". The Guardian . Retrieved 10 August 2022.

Find a Scheme of Work

The secretary of the Inter-Church Peace Council (IKV) in the Netherlands, Mient Jan Faber (left), receiving the first copy of the comic book When the Wind Blows (called When the Bomb Fell in the Dutch version) by Raymond Briggs (right) in 1983 Photo: Dutch National Archives

Tilly soon finds out that a big bear can cause big problems - he takes a LOT of looking after! When she describes the bear's latest antics to her parents they think he's a figment of her imagination - but is he? a b Bailey, Jason M. (10 August 2022). "Raymond Briggs, Who Drew a Wordless 'Snowman,' Dies at 88". The New York Times . Retrieved 10 August 2022. Raymond Briggs – Person – National Portrait Gallery". National Portrait Gallery, London . Retrieved 10 August 2022.

a b c d e (Greenaway Winner 1966). Living Archive: Celebrating the Carnegie and Greenaway Winners. CILIP. Retrieved 14 July 2012. Fee Fi Fo Fum (1964) and The Snowman (1978) were Commended and Highly Commended runners-up for the Greenaway Medal. [17] [a]