The Iris Project

Primordial Soup

We are delighted to announce that "Primordial Soup: Tales of the Greek gods in Oxford", a graphic novel written by Year Eight Classics students at Cheney School between September to December 2020 is now out!

You can read the full book here (please click on the cover):

In September 2020, two Year Eight Latin classes at Cheney School took part in a project to design, write and illustrate a graphic novel which imagines the primordial Greek gods in modern day Oxford. They found out all about the different primordial gods, explored the art form of the graphic novel, and looked at how ancient characters have been imagined in different settings. They then chose characters and storylines, and worked together as a group to decide how to plan the story arc and what to call it. In the end, they settled on having a compilation of mini stories, which they called “Primordial Soup”! 

We are very fortunate to have been supported in this project by two creative artists. Ahmed Alameen, a Kuwaiti author who has created a graphic novel based on characters from the epic Gilgamesh, gave virtual workshops on how to design a graphic novel. 

We are also very lucky to have been joined in this project by Oxford Brookes University Artist Lydia Hall. Lydia worked with the students on the artwork for the story, and turned their artwork and ideas into a cohesive graphic novel. You can see her beautiful illustrations in these pages! 

We are grateful to be have been supported by a grant from Classics for All for this exciting initiative.

We hope you enjoy these stories!

Lorna Robinson, Director of the Iris Project and Classics Centre at Cheney School