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Shortlist announced for second annual Book Illustration Competition

Six illustrators have beaten over 500 entrants to be shortlisted for the second annual Book Illustration Competition, a collaboration between The House of Illustration and The Folio Society.

An example of illustrations shortlisted for The Book Illustration Competition.

The Book Illustration Competition invited entrants to submit three illustrations and a binding design for The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter. The winner will receive a commission worth £4000 to complete a set of seven illustrations for the book, which will be published by The Folio Society in August 2012 with an introduction by Marina Warner. Five runners up will each receive £500 cash.

The winner will be announced at an award ceremony on Tuesday 3rd July. 

After extensive debate the shortlist was selected by a judging panel comprising novelist, critic and cultural historian Marina Warner, illustrator Angela Barrett, last year’s inaugural competition winner Matthew Richardson, and Flora Craig from House of Illustration together with Folio’s Production Director, Publisher and Art Director.

Chair of judges, Marina Warner, said: “Angela Carter’s visual imagination is famous for its vivid originality, and she summons pictures in every reader’s mind – this doesn’t make the illustrator’s task at all easy. But the competition was fierce and the range of submissions fascinatingly varied and vivid.”

The Shortlist

  • Ben Jones is a 28-year-old Manchester based illustrator. He has produced work for companies including Time Out London, Macmillan and Penguin. He is currently working on a project based around the surreal aspects of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
  • Igor Karash studied architecture and urban design at the Azerbaijan Architecture University in 1982, and book design and illustration at Kharkov State Art & Design Academy in Ukraine in 1988. After graduating from the Academy, Igor collaborated with Detskaya Literatura, a leading Russian children’s publishing company, and Kniga Publishing House in Moscow.
  • Sam Kerwin is a 31-year-old in his final year at the University College Falmouth’s highly regarded Illustration course. With a focus on science-based editorial projects and narrative illustration relating to literature, Sam’s work tests the interaction between the opposing worlds of art and science.
  • Ceryn McCarthy is a 21-year-old Illustration student at NUCA. Currently in her 2nd year, illustration is a relatively new discipline having moved across from graphics. Ceryn instantly fell in love with traditional print methods, and intends to expand her print repertoire and continue experimenting.
  • Sidsel Sørensen studied illustration at Cambridge School of Art. Now 25, he is studying for an MA in visual communication at Kolding School of Design, Denmark. Sidel likes his designs to be simple, adding texture, colour and pattern to make them more playful. When drawing, he combines the hand-drawn with all of the possibilities of the digital.
  • Iro Tsavala studied illustration at the Kent Institute of Art and Design, and completed an MA at the Royal College of Art in 2008. Based in east London, she works with editorial and book illustration briefs for clients including The Guardian, Laurence King Publishers and WPP. Iro is interested in the expression of notions and ideas through narrative.

The winner will be announced at an award ceremony on 3rd July at Collyer Bristow Gallery, 4 Bedford Row, London.

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