Raymond Briggs, a British illustrator, cartoonist, graphic novelist and author, died Tuesday at the age of 88 of pneumonia, his publisher Penguin Random House said. He was known for the enchanting magic he created with The Snowman.

The Snowman is a book without words whose cartoon adaptation is televised and whose musical adaptation is staged every Christmas. It has gone on to sell more than 5.5m copies in various formats around the world. The TV film adaptation also received an Oscar nomination for best animated short film.

Briggs’ 1966 book of nursery rhymes, The Mother Goose Treasury, won the Kate Greenaway medal.

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Hilary Delamere, Briggs’s literary agent, said: “Raymond liked to act the professional curmudgeon, but we will remember him for his stories of love and of loss. I know from the many letters he received how his books and animations touched people’s hearts. He kept his curiosity and sense of wonder right up to the last.”

Born in 1934, Briggs went to the local grammar school in Wimbledon. He left school at 15 to go to Wimbledon Art College, a decision that likely puzzled his milkman father. He also went to and Central School of Art to study typography.

From 1953 to 1955, he was a National Service conscript in the Royal Corps of Signals at Catterick. He later returned to study painting at Slade School of Fine Art at University College, London, graduating in 1957.

After briefly pursuing painting, he became a professional illustrator and started working in children’s books. In 1958, he illustrated Peter and the Piskies: Cornish Folk and Fairy Tales, a fairy tale anthology by Ruth Manning-Sanders that was published by Oxford University Press.

From 1961-1986, Briggs began teaching illustration part-time at Brighton School of Art. 

Briggs’ first three important works that were written and illustrated by him were in comics format. Briggs went on to become one of the country’s popular author-illustrators. He released titles in the 1970s such as Father Christmas, Father Christmas Goes on Holiday, Fungus the Bogeyman and The Snowman.

The following decade he produced When the Wind Blows, The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman.

Briggs wife, Jean, who suffered from schizophrenia, died from leukaemia in 1973. They did not have any children.