Metaphrog Nominated For Scottish Culture Awards 2016

By Jeremy Briggs on June 19, 2016

It has been a remarkable 12 months for Metaphrog, the Franco-Scottish duo of artist Sandra Marrs and writer John Chalmers.

August saw them announced as Writers in Residence at the 2015 Edinburgh International Book Festival, in September they were awarded funding by Creative Scotland to research, develop, produce and promote their graphic novel projects, while October saw their adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes And Other Tales released in hardback by American publisher Papercutz, a book that has been so successful that Papercutz have just announced a follow-up in the form of The Little Mermaid to be released in mid-2017.

In addition to all this it has just been announced that they are nominees in the Best Visual Artist category for the inaugural Scottish Culture Awards 2016 sponsored by the Sunday Herald newspaper. The awards define ‘Scottish’ to be the rather wide-ranging “anyone working on a Scottish production or anyone based or born in Scotland working anywhere in the world.”

The awards website states that in the Best Visual Artist category “the nominees might be painters, or sculptors, or photographers or work in multimedia. What they will share will be the ability to use their talents to say something profound – or perhaps wryly amusing – about the world in which we live today.” In addition to John and Sandra, the other Best Visual Artist nominees are sculptor David J Mitchell, animator Eleanor Stewart, and artist Ellie Harrison.

The winners to be announced on 7 July 2016 at the Scottish Culture Awards ceremony in Glasgow and we wish Metaphrog good luck at it.

There are more details of Metaphrog’s work on their website.

There are more details of The Red Shoes And Other Tales on the Papercutz website and a sneak preview of The Little Mermaid on downthetubes here.

Metaphrog have been interviewed on downthetubes here and here and the downthetubes review of The Red Shoes And Other Tales is here.

There are more details of the Scottish Culture Awards 2016 at the awards website and the Sunday Herald website.

Jeremy Briggs

News, reviews, interviews and features for print and on-line: Spaceship Away (since October 2005), Bear Alley (since February 2007), downthetubes (since June 2007), and Eagle Times (since October 2008). Plus DC Thomson’s The Art Of Ian Kennedy, Titan’s Dan Dare and Johnny Red reprints, Ilex’s War Comics: A Graphic History and 500 Essential Graphic Novels, and Print Media’s The Iron Moon and Strip magazine.