Today it was introduced that Alison Bechdel, Catherine Meurisse, and Riad Sattouf are in the operating for Angoulême International Comic Art Festival’s prestigious Grand Prix 2023 profession achievement award. With two girls on the three-person shortlist for this yr, girls proceed to say their place in the Grand Prix after years (many years?) of being snubbed.
The three names on the Grand Prix 2023 shortlist emerged following a nomination course of amongst the skilled comics neighborhood in France and overseas that passed off between January 3 to 9, 2023. The second spherical of voting held between January 11 and January 17 will happen with the winner being declared on the eve of this yr’s Angoulême Festival, Wednesday January 25. The winner will act as honorary president and obtain a particular exhibition at subsequent yr’s pageant.
Of the three Grand Prix 2023 nominees, the most acquainted to Anglophone readers could be Alison Bechdel – award-winning writer of the autobiographical graphic novels Fun Home (which is now a success, award-winning Broadway musical) and Are You My Mother? Prior to changing into a graphic novelist, Bechdel made her title as a cartoonist on the lengthy operating weekly caricature Dykes To Watch Out For, a topical humour and cleaning soap opera collection that featured a big forged of principally lesbian characters which ran from 1983 to 2008 in Funny Times and different homosexual and lesbian newspapers. Her newest critically-acclaimed autobiographical graphic novel The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021) was translated into French in August 2022 and has already been in contention for many awards already in France – together with this yr’s Angoulême Official Selection.
Both Riad Sattouf and Catherine Meurisse are award-winning prolific French cartoonists who’ve a large and numerous physique of labor for adults and kids in France – however solely a fraction has made it into English. Of the two, Anglophones would potential recognise Sattouf for his autobiographical collection Arab of the Future (L’Arabe du Futur) about his upbringing in the Middle East. The collection is very profitable and critically acclaimed in France and abroad. The sixth concluding quantity in the Arab of the Future collection launched in November 2022 in France and can be in the Official Selection of books up for awards at Angoulême 2023. The collection has offered greater than 3 million copies and been translated into 23 languages, together with English – the place the first 4 volumes have been printed by Metropolitan Books. His children collection Esther’s Notebooks (Les Cahiers d’Esther) about the every day lifetime of a fictional neighbour’s daughter has proved very talked-about. Each quantity covers a yr as Esther grows up, starting from age 10 and is deliberate to run till she reaches 18 – the seventh quantity (Esther at age 16) launched in France June 2022. The first three volumes have been launched in the UK by Pushkin Press in 2021. Pantheon will launch a hardcover omnibus version of these first three volumes January 24. While that already looks like a big physique of labor – there’s nonetheless a major quantity of his again catalogue (a lot of which can be critically acclaimed and award profitable) that has but to see translation into English.
If you have been following our protection of the Angoulême Grand Prix final yr – in which Julie Doucet got here out the winner – you’ll recall that Catherine Meurisse was additionally on the landmark all-women shortlist. Criminally nearly none of her work is on the market in English besides a handful of books from digital unique writer Europe Comics. Like Sattouf, Meurisse has produced brief and lengthy kind comics work, political cartoons and caricature – and each cartoonists have labored at controversial French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo. Meurisse was additionally working at Charlie Hebdo when the 2015 assaults occurred. The slender escape and her restoration from the trauma grew to become the 2016 graphic novel La Légèreté (Lightness). She has finished an autobiographical graphic novel about her childhood in the countryside 2018’s Les Grands Espaces (The Great Outdoors). Her newest launch Humaine, trop humaine (Human, Too Human; 2022) is a set of her cartoons, illustrations and musings initially printed in Philosophie Magazine since 2017; her final graphic novel launch was 2021’s The Young Woman and the Sea (La jeune femme et la mer). Her skilled cartooning work extends at the very least way back to 2006 with work for magazines, anthologies and books. In 2020 Meurisse grew to become the first cartoonist to be elected to Paris’ Academy of Fine Arts – in the Painting division – a put up which she held till 2022.
The present system of voting has been in place since 2014 following a collection of controversies that led to girls being virtually locked out from being nominated for the highest honour in French comics as an previous boys membership of former Grand Prix winners would choose nominees and winners – and so they tended to choose their buddies who tended themselves to be male. The present course of is open to the wider skilled comics neighborhood registered with the pageant.
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