Industry pays tribute to artist and author Graham Rawle

Publishers from Chatto & Windus, Vintage Books UK and Atlantic Books UK have paid tribute to the “wonderful” and “uncompromising” writer, artist and designer Graham Rawle who died last month.

As an illustrator, Rawle made his name with the wordplay collage series Lost Consonants which appeared in the Guardian magazine, eight collections of which went on to be published by Fourth Estate.

He was also known for his “wildly creative and unconventional novel” Woman’s World (Atlantic Books, 2005). Set in 1962, it tells the story of Norma Fontaine, who struggles to live up to the recommended ideals of feminine perfection. It was a novel made from collage, with 40,000 words clipped out of vintage magazines and pasted together – an endeavour which took Rawle five years.

Clara Farmer, associate publishing director at Chatto & Windus, who worked with Rawle on Woman’s World and Overland, said: “Graham was a perfectionist who came closer to perfection than anyone else I’ve known. He had astonishing ideas for book projects, and the grit and drive to see them through.

“Graham never seemed to mind the 17-hour days at the cutting mat or the drawing board: if it made for a better picture, a better joke, a better page, he would do it. As an artist and a friend, he made the world a more surprising, fun and less pretentious place. Far from being lost in the past, he found old objects and memories and repurposed them, cheerfully and moving. Graham was a wonderful man whom I shall miss dreadfully, but I am so grateful that his vivid work remains.”

His literary agent for Overland, Will Francis at Janklow & Nesbit, said: “From the moment I first met Graham – who was dressed in a beautiful bottle green vintage suit – I was struck by his unusual combination of uncompromising aesthetic rigour (applied to his own work) and gentleness, generosity and warmth that was applied to everyone else.”

Rawle’s final book Overland (Chatto & Windus, 2018), set in California in 1942, was inspired by the true story of the US Army’s fabrication of a dummy town on top of the Lockheed Aircraft plant, to camouflage it from potential Japanese aerial attack.

Born to Jessie and Denis Rawle in 1955, he was brought up in Birmingham and Sheffield with his brother, the actor Jeff Rawle.

Rawle married the American artist and teacher Margaret Huber in 1991. He spent 20 years teaching the MA sequential design/illustration course at the University of Brighton and was a visiting professor in illustration at Falmouth School of Art and Norwich University of the Arts.

His final project was a film version of Woman’s World, using collaged segments of film. Only one act was complete at the time of his death.