Welcome to the 7th Cheltenham Illustration Awards!
APPLICATION FORMS AND FEE PAYMENT PAGE : CLICK HERE !
The award winning graphic novelist Posy Simmonds , author of Tamara Drewe and Gemma Bovery, has kindly agreed to judge this year's competition! Entry fee is £13 per project, and may be sent via WeTransfer or on disk by post. Details on application forms. Winners will be exhibited in October as part of the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival and in association with the Holst Birthplace Museum, and published in a full colour Annual. Prizes of cash and an Apple computer will be awarded - for full details and application forms please click the link above and/or visit the info page.
The brief for 2013: During the period 1914-1916 Cheltenham-born Gustav Holst (1874-1934) composed The Planets, a seven-piece orchestral suite. Holst called his symphony 'a series of mood pictures'.
Your entry to this year's Cheltenham Illustration Awards should be a personal visual response initiated by this arguably the best-known, best-loved and first Modernist piece of British classical music. Holst imbued each planet with characteristics which were representative of the human life cycle, from youth to old age, beginning with Mars, energetic and bombastic, ending with esoteric Neptune, alone, facing the mystical unknown.
We wish you to also apply the theme of 'Memory' (the theme to the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival 2013) to your response and avoid the obvious interpretations of Roman Gods, astrology etc. Instead, as this is a competition focusing on narrative illustration, your entry may be drawn from your own memory, experience or your own invented fictional response. November 2013 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and as we are also approaching the centenary of the start of the First World War in 2014, it is an especially apt time to consider the fundamental role memory plays in underpinning our lives, our wider culture, our interpretation of the past and our shaping of the future. Memory is to a very significant extent an active creative process of recreation rather than simply information retrieval. With narrative and metaphor at its heart, it¹s remarkably close to fiction writing, and a theme which is fertile ground to explore, with wide-ranging implications for autobiography and memoir, poetry, history and of course fiction.
The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival runs from 4th-13th October 2013 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com
Illustration byHenry Boon
