a Levy Plumb Residency at Christ’s College and the inaugural Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University. His work is regularly exhibited, and is represented in numerous public and private collections. With his wife, the writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave, he is the co-author of Orpheus and Eurydice and Julia and the Shark.
Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea is his debut non-fiction work.
At the Guardian de Freston tagged ten "works [that] complicate our understanding of the links between pain and art," including:
Maus by Art SpiegelmanRead about another entry on the list.
A graphic novel in which the Nazis are cats and the Jews are mice, an extraordinary oral history of Vladek Spiegelman’s life. A metatext in which his son, Art, tries to come to terms with his father’s past and their subsequently difficult relationship. The graphic novel format enables Maus to artfully move between the unimaginable suffering of the Holocaust, survivor’s guilt and the more mundane suffering of old age, petty familial and domestic arguments. Its focus on the specific and the personal are what make it capable of tackling metaphysical and existential questions around human cruelty and the nature of suffering.
Art Spiegelman's Maus appears on Paul Gravett's list of ten graphic novels everyone should read, Nicole Hill's list of five graphic novels for readers unfamiliar with the genre yet willing to give it a try, Ben Frederick's list of ten influential authors who came to the US as immigrants, Mary talbot's top ten list of graphic memoirs, Lev Grossman's top ten list of graphic novels, Danny Fingeroth's top 10 list of graphic novels, Meg Rosoff's top 10 list of adult books for teenagers, and Malorie Blackman's top ten list of graphic novels for teenagers.
--Marshal Zeringue
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