This Year’s Observer/Faber Graphic Short Story Prize Winner Announced: Anna Readman
by Richard Bruton
The annual Observer/Faber Graphic Short Story Prize was announced this week with the brilliant Anna Readman winning the prize…
This year’s winning entry was Dancing Queen by Anna Readman, a hugely talented comics maker whose work has been impressing me for many years now.
Dancing Queen is a perfect little short in b&w, a tale of loss and moving on with life, and one that’s one of the most personal of her works to date, with Readman explaining its origins in this interview in The Guardian:
‘Eight years ago, my friend Annie died suddenly from an undiagnosed heart condition. 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.’
Readman’s work has already been seen in 2000 AD where she drew the return of Abelard Snazz (Prog 2206); the Terror Tale, Half Life (Prog 2316), and Renk in Progs 2296 and 2346. And be sure to go look at her work online, I’d absolutely recommend anything she’s done but the best things to start with may be Handlebar Gumbo, her 2021 collection of daily diary comics, Noodle Wranglin’, a collection of hourly comic book day strips from Feb 2023, and her anthology Peach Fuzz – issue one is out now and hopefully, she’ll have issue 2 ready to show the world at this weekend’s Thought Bubble Festival.
You can read the entirety of Anna’s Dancing Queen here, but here’s just a little of what to expect…
This year’s runner-up for the prize was Safe Passage by Candy Gourlay – a Philippines-set tale in 1941 during the Japanese invasion. Gourlay’s already a children’s author – Bone Talk was shortlisted for the Carnegie medal – but, at 61, it turns out she’d always harboured dreams of creating comics and this is the year she’s doing it. And if Safe Passage is any indicator, hers is a name we should be hearing more of.
Gourlay describes Safe Passage as, “based on a story about ant hills and magic and superstition that my father told us – he was eight when the war broke out, and his mother fled the Japanese with all of her children – but which is really about fear of the unknown.”
Again, read the entirety of it here and to get a little taste…
The Observer/Faber Graphic Short Story prize has been running a fair number of years now – this is its 16th years – and it’s already given prizes to the likes of Isabel Greenberg, Matthew Dooley, Joff Winterhart, Paul Rainey – all of whom have gone on to get publishing deals and, in Winterhart’s case, a film deal out of the award.
Anna Readman‘s winning entry gets published in the Observer newspaper and the £1,000 prize, whilst runner-up Candy Gourley has her strip published online at the Observer and wins £250. Judging the award this year were the Guardian/Observer journalist Rachel Cooke; Angus Cargill, publishing director at Faber; man at the crossroads Paul Gravett, the comic expert’s comic expert; Tom Oldham of London’s finest comic shop, Gosh; the great comic maker Lizzy Stewart, whose debut graphic novel, Alison, came out in 2022; and best-selling author Max Porter.
The Observer/Faber/Comica short story prize 2023
Winner – Anna Readman – Dancing Queen – read it here. Readman’s website / Twitter
Runner-up – Candy Gourley – Safe Passage – read it here. Gourley’s website / Twitter.
