Posy Simmonds wins the Grand Prix at Angoulême

British cartoonist Posy Simmonds has won Angouleme’s Grand Prix, thought of certainly one of the highest honors in comics worldwide. 

Simmonds received over the different finalists Daniel Clowes and Catherine Meurisse, and the award, offered for a lifetime physique of labor, is actually hard-earned. Simmonds, 78, has been a family identify in England for many years, along with her comics serialized in newspapers reminiscent of The Guardian, and was function movies. Her work contains such classics as Gemma Bovary, a contemporary model of Madame Bovary, and Tamara Drewe, an up to date telling of Far From The Madding Crowd, and most lately, Cassandra Drake, a  thriller a few center aged artwork vendor. Simmonds work is really worthy of the phrase graphic novel, with a depth of plot and character and marvelous artwork. She’s actually somebody who lives up the that means of this award. She’s additionally fairly well-known in France, and as a fluent French speaker she’ll be an amazing Grand Marshall for the 2025 Angoulême competition. 

Simmonds is the third feminine recognized cartoonist to win  in the final decade to win the award, following Rumiko Takahashi and Julie Doucet, after 40 years of 1 girl profitable the primary prize and one particular prize in the award’s first 30-40 years. 

Perhaps much more considerably, she is the seventh non-French cartoonist to win in the final 15 years, after virtually solely French cartoonists profitable for many years. That led to criticism that the prize was not a worldwide cartooning award; following an embarrassingly sexist controversy in 2016 that led to a widening of the eligible voters for the award that led to a extra globally numerous group, together with freshening and youthification. 

Angoulême Grand Prix Winners 2010-2024

•   2010: Baru

•   2011: Art Spiegelman

•   2012: Jean-Claude Denis 

•         2013: Bernard Willem Holtrop (Willem)

◦                     fortieth anniversary Akira Toriyama

•   2014: Bill Watterson

•   2015: Katsuhiro Otomo

•   2016: Hermann Huppen

•   2017: Cosey Bernard Cosendai)

•   2018: Richard Corben

•   2019: Rumiko Takahashi

2020s

•   2020 : Emmanuel Guibert 

•   2021: Chris Ware

•   2022: Julie Doucet

•   2023: Riad Sattouf

• 2024: Posy Simmonds