Posy Simmonds
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Rosemary Elizabeth "Posy" Simmonds (born 9 August 1945) is a British newspaper cartoonist and writer and illustrator of children's books. She is best known for her long association with The Guardian, for which she most recently drew a weekly cartoon titled Literary Life.
Posy Simmonds was born in Berkshire and educated at a boarding school, the Sorbonne and the Central School of Art & Design in London. She started her newspaper career drawing a strip for The Sun in 1969 before joining The Guardian as an illustrator in 1972.
In 1979 she started drawing a weekly comic strip for The Guardian, initially titled The Silent Three of St. Botolph's as a tribute to the 1950s strip The Silent Three by Evelyn Flinders. The strip focused on three 1950s schoolfriends in their later, middle-class and nearly middle-aged lives: Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to polytechnic sociology lecturer George with a large brood of children; Jo Heep, married to whisky salesman Edmund with two rebellious teenagers; and Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope with a young baby. The strip, which was latterly untitled and usually known just as "Posy", ran until the late 1980s. It was collected into a number of books: Mrs Weber's Diary, Pick of Posy, Very Posy and Pure Posy, and one original cartoon book featuring the same characters, True Love. Her later cartoons for The Guardian and The Spectator were collected as Mustn't Grumble in 1992.
In 1987 Simmonds turned her hand to writing, as well as illustrating, children's books. Fred, the story of a cat with a secret life, was later filmed as Famous Fred and nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Short Film and several BAFTAs. Her other children's books include Lulu and the Flying Babies, The Chocolate Wedding and Lavender.
In the late 1990s Posy returned to the pages of The Guardian with Gemma Bovery, which reworked the story of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary into a satirical tale of English expatriates in France. It was published as a graphic novel in [[1999]. Literary Life appeared in The Guardian's "Review" section on Saturdays from November 2002 until December 2004. One collected edition of Literary Life cartoons has been published. The Guardian has said that Posy will make another return in the autumn of 2005.
External links
- Literary Life (http://books.guardian.co.uk/posysimmonds/)
- Lambiek comiclopedia entry on Posy Simmonds (http://www.lambiek.net/simmonds_posy.htm)
- Profile from the British Council's "Magic Pencil" exhibition (http://magicpencil.britishcouncil.org/artists/simmonds/)