The winners of the 2024 Doug Wright Awards were announced this weekend at a ceremony that was livestreamed from the Arts & Letters Club in Toronto, as a part of TCAF weekend. The ceremony was hosted by cartoonist Dustin Harbin.
The Doug Wright Awards honor “the best work and most promising talent in Canadian comics,” and have been awarded annually since 2005.
Emily Carroll took home the award for “Best Book” for A Guest in the House, which was published by First Second last August. The graphic novel won the L.A. Times Book Prize earlier this year and has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award as well.
“It’s wild to think of myself, when I first exhibited at TCAF, the idea of one day being here accepting this award — it’s completely surreal,” Carroll said during her acceptance speech.
This year’s Nipper Award, which recognizes emerging talent in the Canadian comics community, went to Vincy Lim. Lim is the creator of many self-published comics, including When She Set Fire to my Friends’ Houses and When I Was a Kid.
The Pigskin Peters award, which recognizes small press or micro-press comics, went to Tyler Landry for Old Caves, which was published by Uncivilized Books. Old Caves is Landry’s debut graphic novel, and it’s about an old man who searches through a snow-covered forest “in pursuit of the unknown,” while at night remembering his deceased wife.
The Egghead Award, which recognizes the best book for kids, went to Otis & Peanut by Naseem Hrab and Kelly Collier. It was published by Owlkids Books and is about two friends, a long-haired guinea pig and a naked mole rat.
The Doug Wright Awards also inducted two into the Giants of the North, their hall of fame: Deni Loubert, the one-time publisher and founder of Renegade Press and one-time publisher and co-founder of Aardvark-Vanaheim; and Maurice Vellekoop, the cartoonist and fashion designer whose comics and illustrations have appeared in Time, GQ, Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, Madamoiselle and many other magazines, as well as in the graphic novels The World of Gloria Badcock, A Nut at the Opera and I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together. Finally, they paid tribute to two who passed away in the past year — comics creator Joe Matt and Phyllis Wright Thomas, the widow of Doug Wright.