V&A Illustration Awards 2017 winners announced, with top prize going to Trump Wave

The winners of the V&A Illustration Awards 2017 have been announced, celebrating this year’s best artwork for editorial and books. A. Richard Allen won the Moira Gemmill Illustrator of the Year award for Trump Wave, a “satirical homage” to Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa featured in The Sunday Telegraph Money. This also won the best editorial illustration category.

The judging panel praised his use of Hokusai in a contemporary context “to invoke echoes of the past to reinforce the reality that history matters”.

Best book cover design was awarded to Aino-Maija Metsola’s illustrations for Vintage Classics’ Virginia Woolf series.

Jarvis won best illustrated book for Alan’s Big, Scary Teeth for Walker Books.

The awards also honour a student illustrator of the year, which for 2017 went to Beatriz Lostalé Seijo for The Odyssey. She studied at Anglia Ruskin University and Cambridge School of Art. The runner-up was Tom Spooner from the RCA for Towards an Infinite Place.

Each category winner is awarded £3,000 while the top prize winner also receives £5,000, and the student runner-up wins £2,000. They are chosen from over 800 submissions by a judging panel including Jane Scherbaum, Loyd Grossman and Beryl Kingston for the professional categories and John O’Reilly and Jason Brooks for the student category. All the winning artworks will be displayed at the National Art Library until 20 August 2017.