Alice Walker

The Color Purple

£65

Illustrated by Lela Harris

One of the greatest works of modern fiction, Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple is presented in a beautifully crafted new Folio edition, illustrated by British artist Lela Harris. 

The Color Purple

£65
Book Details
 
Presentation Box & BindingBound in printed and blocked cloth
Printed slipcase
Dimensions9 inches x 5¾ inches
FontSet in Berkeley
Pages272 pages
AuthorAlice Walker
Illustrated byLela Harris
IllustrationFrontispiece and 6 charcoal illustrations
Publication Date12/10/2021
Editor's Notes
 
The Color Purple is one of the great novels of the 20th century, exploring the extremes of human nature through the eyes of a young African American woman in 1930s Georgia. Deemed controversial on publication for its explicit portrayal of abuse – it was banned in American school libraries until 2013 – The Color Purple is an important and beautifully imagined novel that will deeply affect and enrich everyone who reads it.
This much-anticipated Folio edition celebrates the cultural significance of Alice Walker’s novel with a cover designed by artist Lela Harris and inspired by the renowned quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, a collective of female artisans. Inside, Harris’s emotive charcoal illustrations capture the vulnerability of the characters, while Walker’s note on revisiting the novel decades after publication reiterates its importance as a record of ‘vanished voices’.
Runner-up of the Book Cover category at the V&A Illustration Awards 2022.

About the Illustrator

Lela Harris

Lela Harris is a self-taught artist who lives and works in the English Lake District. Most of her time is either spent daydreaming about art or making art in her small home studio. A key component of her work is experimenting with materials, discovering new techniques and exploring different subject matters, resulting in an eclectic mix of work. This is Lela’s first professional illustration commission. Lela is also a graphic designer and the owner of Doodlelove, a company specialising in limited-edition prints and stationery.

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About the Illustrator

Lela Harris

Lela Harris is a self-taught artist who lives and works in the English Lake District. Most of her time is either spent daydreaming about art or making art in her small home studio. A key component of her work is experimenting with materials, discovering new techniques and exploring different subject matters, resulting in an eclectic mix of work. This is Lela’s first professional illustration commission. Lela is also a graphic designer and the owner of Doodlelove, a company specialising in limited-edition prints and stationery.

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About the Illustrator

Lela Harris

Lela Harris is a self-taught artist who lives and works in the English Lake District. Most of her time is either spent daydreaming about art or making art in her small home studio. A key component of her work is experimenting with materials, discovering new techniques and exploring different subject matters, resulting in an eclectic mix of work. This is Lela’s first professional illustration commission. Lela is also a graphic designer and the owner of Doodlelove, a company specialising in limited-edition prints and stationery.

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About the Illustrator

Lela Harris

Lela Harris is a self-taught artist who lives and works in the English Lake District. Most of her time is either spent daydreaming about art or making art in her small home studio. A key component of her work is experimenting with materials, discovering new techniques and exploring different subject matters, resulting in an eclectic mix of work. This is Lela’s first professional illustration commission. Lela is also a graphic designer and the owner of Doodlelove, a company specialising in limited-edition prints and stationery.

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About the Illustrator

Lela Harris

Lela Harris is a self-taught artist who lives and works in the English Lake District. Most of her time is either spent daydreaming about art or making art in her small home studio. A key component of her work is experimenting with materials, discovering new techniques and exploring different subject matters, resulting in an eclectic mix of work. This is Lela’s first professional illustration commission. Lela is also a graphic designer and the owner of Doodlelove, a company specialising in limited-edition prints and stationery.

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About the Illustrator

Lela Harris

Lela Harris is a self-taught artist who lives and works in the English Lake District. Most of her time is either spent daydreaming about art or making art in her small home studio. A key component of her work is experimenting with materials, discovering new techniques and exploring different subject matters, resulting in an eclectic mix of work. This is Lela’s first professional illustration commission. Lela is also a graphic designer and the owner of Doodlelove, a company specialising in limited-edition prints and stationery.

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About the Author

Alice Walker was born into a sharecropping family in rural Georgia in 1944. After coming top of her class in a segregated high school, she won a scholarship to college, and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York in 1965. On returning to the South, she worked in Mississippi: for the NAACP, as a writer-in-residence, and as a college teacher. She was an activist in the civil rights and feminist movements – notably as a contributor to Ms magazine and a pioneer in the rehabilitation of neglected writers of colour such as Zora Neale Hurston. After publishing novels and poetry during the 1970s she gained widespread international acclaim for The Color Purple, for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Since then, she has continued to work as a writer – of fiction, poetry, memoir and essays – and an activist who developed the theory of ‘womanism’ to explore her experience as a feminist of colour.