English illustrator, cartoonist, graphic novelist and author who achieved critical and popular success among adults and children. He is best known in Britain for his 1978 story The Snowman, a book without words whose cartoon adaptation is televised and whose musical adaptation is staged every Christmas.
Briggs won the 1966 and 1973 Kate Greenaway Medals from the British Library Association, recognising the year’s best children’s book illustration by a British subject. For the 50th anniversary of the Medal (1955–2005), a panel named Father Christmas (1973) one of the top-ten winning works, which composed the ballot for a public election of the nation’s favourite. For his contribution as a children’s illustrator, Briggs was a runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1984. He was a patron of the Association of Illustrators.
The son of a milkman father and former lady’s maid-turned-housewife, he pursued cartooning from an early age. He attended the Wimbledon School of Art (1949-1953) to study painting, Central School of Art to study typography, and Slade School of Fine Art to study painting (1956-1957).
After briefly pursuing painting, he became a professional illustrator, and taught illustration part-time at Brighton School of Art (1961-1986).
Briggs’s wife Jean, who suffered from schizophrenia, died from leukaemia in 1973, two years after his parents’ death. They did not have any children. His long-term partner, Liz, died in October 2015 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Briggs died of pneumonia at Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton on 9 August 2022, aged 88.
Link to Wikipedia biography