Quick Hits | Posy Simmonds wins the 2024 Grand Prix at Angoulême

Plus: News on the Eisners, Brett Lewis, Bill Griffith and more.

British cartoonist and illustrator Posy Simmonds has been awarded the Grand Prix at France’s annual Angoulême International Comics Festival. Simmonds beat out Daniel Clowes and Catherine Meurisse to capture the prize, and is only the fourth woman to be awarded the Grand Prix in its 50-year history.

Simmonds, 78, has done it all in her career, including comic illustration, daily press cartoons, weekly comic strips, best-selling albums, children’s books and screen adaptations. Her debut graphic novel, True Love, is one of the first British graphic novels, and she went on to create the well-regarded Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe and Cassandra Darke. She began her career doing comic strips for the Sun, the Times and the Guardian, where she spent the majority of her career. Later in life, she would start creating children’s books, and her most famous, Fred, went onto become an Academy Award-nominated short film, Famous Fred.

“I always think in a perfect world, the gender of a prize winner shouldn’t be remarkable,” Simmonds told the Guardian. “But it’s an imperfect world and the comics and bande déssinée world has always been a masculine milieu, a bit of a boys’ club. But, bit by bit, especially over the last decade, women have infiltrated it, so I’m pleased to be one of them, of course.”

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Riad Sattouf named Grand Prix winner at 50th annual Angoulême

The creator of ‘The Arab of the Future’ wins the French festival’s biggest prize.

Riad Sattouf, the creator of The Arab of the Future and Esther’s Notebook, has won this year’s Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

The 44-year-old French cartoonist, who has also directed feature films, was quoted as saying “I am deeply honored and moved. It’s the centerpiece that was missing at the top of my ego pyramid” upon accepting the award.

Sattouf is best known for The Arab of the Future, or L’Arabe du Futur, his six-book collection about growing up in Libya and Syria in the 1970s and 1980s. Four of them have been released in the United States. He’s also a former contributor to France’s satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and is the creator of the Esther’s Notebooks comic strip, a collection of which was released this month in the United States.

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Three women nominated for Grand Prix d’Angouleme

Penelope Bagieu, Julie Doucet, and Catherine Meurisse are on the shortlist for the prestigious lifetime award.

For the first time ever, the final nominees for the Grand Prix d’Angouleme are all women. Pénélope Bagieu, Julie Doucet, and Catherine Meurisse were chosen by a jury of their peers—literally: All comics creators whose work is published in France are eligible to vote for the nominees.

The winner will be announced on March 16.

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