Fascinating articles about how graphic novels are breaking through to win serious literary awards.
With the award of a Costa prize
to Mary and Bryan Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, the rise of the
literary comic intersects with the decline of cradle-to-grave biography, in one
of those wonders of happenstance that are the dream of prize administrators the
world over.
Since they took over from the
Whitbread awards back in 2006, the Costas have struggled to find new life in a
roster of prizes that has often appeared to be outmoded.
The biography category has
looked particularly jaded – a monument to a form that arguably reached its peak
around the time Richard Holmes and John Richardson won with Coleridge and
Picasso in the late 1980s and early 90s, but which mislaid its mojo somewhere
in the dying days of the 20th century.
The choice of Dotter of Her
Father's Eyes is a coup on two fronts: it strikes a blow for one of the edgiest
literary forms of the early 21st century, while anointing a work with the
highest literary pedigree.
Its literary ambitions don't
just involve choice of subject – James Joyce's tempestuous relationship with
his daughter Lucia – but of form. In true modernist style, Mary M Talbot has
intercut the Joyces' story with that of her own relationship with her father,
the distinguished Joyce scholar James S Atherton.
Both fathers were obsessive and
difficult, with a singlemindedness that was hard to square with family life.
Though Mary didn't suffer the fate of the talented and nervy Lucia, who ended
her days in an asylum, it's easy to see why this story of filial overshadowing
should have become so haunting for her.
But father-daughter
relationships are not the only ones memorialised in this book, and it's perhaps
not being too fanciful to see it in part as a tribute to the partnership that
made its creation possible, that of Mary and Bryan Talbot. For it is he who has
brought her story to pictorial life, with illustrations that move from the
black and white of early 20th century Paris through the sepia of postwar
Britain to the full colour of the present day, with their own 1970 wedding at
its heart.
In its elision of memoir and
biography, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes follows Edmund de Waal's The Hare with
Amber Eyes, which took the biography prize in 2010 and was narrowly pipped as
Book of the Year by Jo Shapcott's poetry collection Of Mutability (the nearest
a biography has come to winning the overall prize since the the awards were
renamed). As a triumph of collaborative imagination, it's out on its own.
A graphic work has been named
as the winner of the biography section in the 2012 Costa book awards – a first for the prestigious literary prize that also reached
another significant milestone when women swept the board in the five
categories.
Mary Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's
Eyes, which was illustrated by her husband Bryan, a veteran of the comic genre,
won biography of the year while Hilary Mantel won the novel award for Bring Up
the Bodies; Francesca Segal won first novel for The Innocents; Kathleen Jamie's
The Overhaul came first in poetry, and Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon was named
children's book of the year.
"It's wonderful,"
said Talbot on hearing that a woman won in every category. "It just shows
how much female talent there is out there."
She and her husband won the
£5,000 biography prize for a book that interweaves the true and tragic story of
James Joyce's daughter Lucia with the author's own troubled relationship with
her father, the eminent Joycean scholar James S Atherton.
The Talbots have known of the
win for several weeks. "It has been really hard keeping quiet about
it," said Mary. "We were astonished. Just being shortlisted was
amazing and hearing we'd won the category was stunning. We're delighted of
course, both personally – it's the first story I've had published – but also
for the medium, I can't believe a graphic novel has won."
It is not the first graphic
work to win a major literary prize – Art Spiegelman's Maus won a Pulitzer in
1992 and Chris Ware won the
Guardian first book prize in 2001 for Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth – but the Costa award is still a significant moment for the
graphic medium.
"It is a good thing for
graphic novels as a whole," said Bryan Talbot whose prodigious output
includes The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Alice in Sunderland as well as
strips for Judge Dredd and Batman. "Graphic novels are becoming
increasingly accepted as a legitimate art form."
The last graphic novel spike
came about 25 years ago with the popularity of books such as The Dark Knight
Returns, Watchmen and Maus. The problem then, said Talbot, was that there were
not enough books to feed this. "By the time you'd read a dozen or so of
the best titles, there wasn't enough left to keep this nascent interest going.
Since then, there has been an increasing number of graphic novels published and
now we have this whole canon of quality work.
"We are living in the
golden age of graphic novels. There are more and better comics being drawn
today than ever in the history of the medium and there's such a range of styles
of artwork, of genre and of subject matter."
Judges called Dotter of Her
Father's Eyes "a beautifully crafted" work "which crosses the
boundaries between literature and the graphic genre with extraordinary
effect".
The Talbots' book was not the
only graphic work to feature in this year's Costas. Joff Winterhart had been
nominated in the novel section for Days of the Bagnold Summer but he missed out
to Mantel who became the first author to win the Man Booker prize and the Costa
novel prize in the same year. Her book, Bring Up the Bodies, the second
instalment of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, won from a shortlist that included
novels by James Meek and Stephen May.
The children's book section was
won by Gardner for Maggot Moon, which has as its hero a 15-year-old dyslexic
boy written off by his teachers and bullied by schoolmates. Gardner admitted
bursting into tears on the number 73 bus when she heard of her win. "I
felt such a muppet but it was amazing – I just couldn't believe it."
Maggot Moon is very much
informed by Gardner's own dyslexia and childhood when she was expelled from one
school and branded unteachable at another. She speaks passionately about how
dyslexia should not be seen as a problem: "It is not to do with spelling,
it is to do with differences. If we are educated differently, more
imaginatively, more out of the box there would be less failures."
The Scottish poet Kathleen
Jamie won her category for poems described by judges as "the collection
that will convert you to poetry". The Overhaul is Jamie's first collection
since she won the Forward Prize in 2004 for The Tree House.
Segal, a journalist who for
three years wrote the Observer's debut fiction series, won the first novel
prize for a work inspired by Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, relocating
it to modern day Hampstead.
Each category winner takes away
£5,000 – as well as an inevitable increase in sales – and competes again for
the overall Costa book of the year which will be announced on 29 January and is
decided by a judging panel chaired by Jenni Murray from BBC Radio 4's Woman's
Hour. Bookmakers William Hill have named Mantel favourite at 5/4 followed by
Segal (3/1); the Talbots (4/1); Jamie (5/1) and Gardner (7/1).
If Mantel does win, it will continue
the novel's success in the Costa book awards. Since the book of the year prize
was introduced in 1985, it has been won 10 times by a novel, four times by a
first novel, five times by a biography, seven times by a collection of poetry
and once by a children's book.
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