Raymond Briggs is one of the UK’s most beloved children’s authors, the creator of characters from The Snowman to Fungus the Bogeyman. But in his forthcoming book Time for Lights Out, a “head-on” confrontation with old age and death, he describes himself as nothing more than a “long-haired, artsy-fartsy type” who “did pictures for kiddy books / Or some such tripe”.

The collection of short pieces, which has been in the works for more than a decade, will be published in November by Jonathan Cape, it was announced on Wednesday. Illustrated with Briggs’s pencil drawings, Time for Lights Out starts from the 85-year-old’s school days and his time as an evacuee during the second world war, touching on his memories of his parents and his childhood home.

“Some [of the pieces are] funny, some melancholy, some remembering his wife, who died young, others about the joy of grandchildren, of walking the dog,” said Jonathan Cape.

Most of the collection, however, centres on Briggs’s home in Sussex, said the publisher, giving a glimpse of one of the forthcoming collection’s poems:

“Looking round this house, / What will they say, / The future ghosts?” Briggs writes. “There must have been / Some barmy old bloke here, / Long-haired, artsy- fartsy type, / Did pictures for kiddy books / Or some such tripe. / You should have seen the stuff / He stuck up in that attic! / Snowman this and snowman that, / Tons and tons of tat.”

Briggs told the Telegraph in 2007 that Time for Lights Out would “definitely be my last” book and was “bound to have a sad ending”. In 2015, he showed the Independent one entry from the book – a list of illustrators’ names, with the dates of their deaths beside them, and another list noting the health of living illustrators. “I don’t like being taken by surprise by people telling me one of them’s died,” he said.

Dan Franklin, who acquired the book for Jonathan Cape, said that “in some ways, all of Raymond’s books have been about death”.

“Here he confronts it head-on in a book that is honest and truthful and very touching. Ethel & Ernest [about his parents] was the very first book on the Cape graphic novel list. It’s wonderful to be publishing him again,” said Franklin.