‘It would be amazing if this led to something’: Anna Readman, winner of our graphic short story prize 2023
Dancing Queen, Readman’s meditation on a lost friend, won this year’s Observer/Faber graphic short story prize. Now she’s glad she gave up the day job…
Last November, Anna Readman, 26, gave up her job in a Leeds comics shop, hoping to make a living full time from cartooning. But the year since hasn’t been easy. The two big gigs she had lined up fell through soon afterwards. “It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster,” she says. “I’ve been jumping from little job to little job, trying to make ends meet.” All of which makes the news that she is the winner of the 2023 Observer/Faber graphic short story prize so much sweeter. (Even better, this was the first time she had entered, having long been nagged to do so by her mum, an Observer subscriber.) It’s a few days since she heard the news, but she still sounds slightly in shock.
Readman’s story, Dancing Queen, has a dark, Charles Burns-style mood. Its characters’ eyes cannot always be seen; an old VW camper van morphs into a hearse; a fairytale castle looms improbably over a small town. But its narrative, a story of loss and the passing of time, was inspired by a very real event. “Eight years ago, my friend Annie died suddenly from an undiagnosed heart condition,” she tells me. “It was the month before she turned 18. Dancing Queen had been in my head for a while because people around me are beginning to settle down now, and this has made me reflect on where she’d be, and what she’d be doing, and on how the fact she isn’t around contrasts with my own life, and what I’m doing.” It is, she says, the most personal comic she has ever drawn, even if this may not initially seem to be the case to a reader: “One great thing about comics is that they allow for unbridled visual experimentation: you can deploy surrealism as a device to get across nuanced feelings, even as it helps you maintain a kind of distance from them, too.”
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/zvjUMir
No comments