Raymond Redvers Briggs CBE passed away on August 9, 2022 at age 88.
He was born on January 18, 1934 in Wimbledon, Surrey, England to Ernest Briggs and Ethel Briggs.
Raymond Briggs was a British illustrator, cartoonist, graphic novelist and author.
Briggs attended Rutlish School. He pursued cartooning from an early age and, despite the opposition of his father who wanted him to take up a more lucrative profession, he attended the Wimbledon School of Art from 1949 to 1953 to study painting, and the Central School of Art to study typography.
From 1953 to 1955, he was a National Service conscript in the Royal Corps of Signals at Catterick, where he was given a role of a draughtsman.
After the service, he went to the Slade School of Fine Art, from where he graduated in 1957.
After briefly pursuing painting, he became a professional illustrator and soon began working on children’s books.
His first major work was to illustrate an anthology of Cornish fairy tales, Peter and the Piskies, which was published in 1958. They were collected by Ruth Manning-Sanders, who later used Briggs on another of her collections, The Hamish Hamilton Book of Magical Beasts.
His breakthrough came in 1973 with the publication of Father Christmas. Briggs had become frustrated with the traditional children’s storybook format and instead turned it into a strip cartoon, a novel idea for children’s books at the time.
Briggs won his first major award, the Kate Greenaway Medal, in 1966, for his 800 illustrations in The Mother Goose Treasury, a collection of fairy tales and nursery rhymes.
Ethel & Ernest, a 1998 graphic novel based on the lives of his parents, won him the Best Illustrated Book of the Year at the 1999 Book Awards.
The story was turned into an animated film and featured Jim Broadbent and Brenda Blethyn which, after appearing in cinemas was aired by the BBC amid Christmas 2016.
Briggs’ work was recognised with the award of an OBE in the 2017 Birthday Honours.
Raymond Briggs’ funeral rites are yet to be announced by the family.