Peter Blegvad

b. 1951, United Kingdom

PETER BLEGVAD – Biography

Peter is an artist, writer, broadcaster and musician, born in New York in 1951, but based for most of his life in London.  He’s married to the painter Chloë Fremantle. They have a daughter, Kaye, and a son, Viggo.

Peter’s cartoon strip, Leviathan, ran in the Independent on Sunday from 1991-’98 and The Book of Leviathan was published in 2000 by Sort Of Books in the UK and by Overlook Press in the US where it was nominated for an Eisner award. In 2010 a Mandarin translation was published by the China Times Publishing Company, and in 2013 l’Apocalypse published a French translation which won a Prix Révélation at the Angoulême Festival, 2014.  Matt Groening (creator of The Simpsons) said: “Peter Blegvad’s comic strip is one of the greatest, weirdest things I’ve ever stared at. Give me Leviathan or give me death!”

Blegvad won a Sony award in 2003 as writer and performer of ‘Eartoons for the Verb’ broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and another in 2012 for ‘Use It Or Lose It’, one of several radio plays he has written and recorded in collaboration with composer and sound designer Iain Chambers. 

He has been writing and recording music since the mid 70s with Slapp Happy, Faust, Henry Cow, John Greaves, The Golden Palominos, John Zorn, Andy Partridge and others. His latest album is ‘Go Figure’ (2017) on the ReR MegaCorp label. The Peter Blegvad bandbox (six CDs with an 80 page booklet) was released on the same label in 2018.

In 2014 his book Kew. Rhone. was published by Uniformbooks (“this delightful book, full of wit, pictures and Blegvad’s densely literary considerations, sprouting thickets of footnotes” —Clive Bell, The Wire, 372).

A book about his lifelong epistemological illustration project, Imagine, Observe, Remember was published in 2020 by Uniformbooks/Amateur Enterprises. (It’s “like theory fiction crossed with a graphic novel; and other than Paul Klee’s notebooks, I can’t think of anything else quite like it.”  — Sally O’Reilly) Related works have been exhibited in Kunstverein Hannover and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2004), in the Kunsthalle Luzern (2007), in Extra City, Antwerp (2010) and elsewhere.

Peter was Honorary Teaching Fellow on the Writing Program at the University of Warwick from 1995 - 2012, and has lectured internationally on various subjects including Milk, Numinous Objects and ‘Nothing, Everything and Something.’ As leader of the creative writing course for Warwick's International Gateway for Gifted Youth (IGGY) he worked with students and writers in Singapore and Botswana as well as the UK. 

He taught freelance at the Royal College of Art for some years before joining the staff officially as Senior Tutor in Visual Writing from 2013 to 2016. 

In 2000 he was Awarded the Ordre de la Grande Gidouille by the Collège de 'Pataphysique, Paris, and in 2010 was elected president of the London Institute of 'Pataphysics.

He co-hosts the Amateur Enterprises website (www.amateur.org.uk) with designer Simon Lucas.

CV

Representation

Royal Watercolour Society Galleries