Raymond Redvers Briggs CBE (18 January 1934 – 9 August 2022)[1] was an English illustrator, cartoonist, graphic novelist and author.

[3][4] 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.

In 1961, Briggs began teaching illustration part-time at Brighton School of Art, which he continued until 1986;[14][15] one of his students was Chris Riddell, who went on to win three Greenaway Medals.

[1] According to a retrospective presentation by the librarians, The Mother Goose Treasury "is a collection of 408 traditional and well loved poems and nursery rhymes, illustrated with over 800 colour pictures by a young Raymond Briggs".

When the Wind Blows (1982) confronted the trusting, optimistic Bloggs couple with the horror of nuclear war, and was praised in the House of Commons for its timeliness and originality.

[25] This book was turned into a two-handed radio play with Peter Sallis in the male lead role, and subsequently an animated film, featuring John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft.

[27] Briggs's wife Jean Taprell Clarke, who had schizophrenia, died from leukaemia in 1973, two years after his parents' death.

Briggs won the 1992 Kurt Maschler Award, or the "Emil", both for writing and for illustrating The Man, a short graphic novel featuring a boy and a homunculus.

The award committee stated: With surprising page-turns, felicitous pauses, and pitch-perfect dialogue, Briggs renders the drama and humour of child–adult and child–bear relations, while questioning the nature of imagination and reality.

[40] Briggs was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to literature.

[41] A book about his life's work entitled Raymond Briggs: The Illustrators was written by Nicolette Jones and published in 2020.