Emily Haworth-Booth is a comics artist who teaches courses on comics and graphic novels at the Royal Drawing School and has run workshops for adults and children at venues including the Hay Festival, Saatchi Gallery, St George's Hospital, Kentish Town City Farm, Momentum Project Newham and the National Art & Design Saturday Club at Kingston University. Emily won the Observer/Comica/Jonathan Cape Graphic Short Story Prize in 2013 and was runner-up of the same prize in 2008. She has also performed stand-up comedy at many London venues and was a finalist in the 2007 Nivea Funny Women Awards. Her comics have appeared in the Observer, Miss Vogue and on the Conversation website.
On drawing
When we're making work in a professional or art
school context and become focused on what our drawings look like to others,
it can be easy to forget how nourishing the simple act of drawing can be, no
matter what the final product is, or whether we even get there. Yet it's true
that there is also something immensely satisfying, and even healing, in seeing
that we have created something on the page, a complete world that is entirely
our own but which also connects us vividly to the world outside ourselves. For both these reasons – the process and the product of drawing – it
has remained an essential resource throughout my life, allowing me both
to accept and rise to circumstances as they occur. Used together, observational and
imaginative drawing allow us to perceive the world as it really is and yet
re-create our response to it so that we can flourish. As a teacher I
find it immensely satisfying to see students tell their own stories through drawing, and become both the authors and
readers of their own lives.
Borough MarketCopyright Emily Haworth-Booth
SketchbookCopyright Emily Haworth-Booth
Extract from SnowCopyright Emily Haworth-Booth
Extract from Work in ProgressCopyright Emily Haworth-Booth
