Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: Angoulême, Anouk Ricard
Anouk Ricard Wins Angoulême International Comics Festival Grand Prix
Anouk Ricard, creator of the graphic novel Animan, has won this year's Angoulême International Comics Festival Grand Prix 2025.
Article Summary
- Anouk Ricard wins 2025 Angoulême Grand Prix, becoming next year's festival honorary president.
- First time all three Grand Prix finalists were women; Ricard succeeded Posy Simmonds as poster designer.
- Ricard's journey: from Anna and Froga comics to Animan, her acclaimed 2022 graphic novel.
- Nominees Catherine Meurisse and Alison Bechdel round out this historic recognition.
Anouk Ricard has won the Grand Prix of the 52nd edition of the Angoulême International Comics Festival, the most prestigious award in comic books. The prize will also see Anouk Ricard made an honorary President of next year's Angoulême International Comics Festival, and she will draw the festival poster, just as Posy Simmonds has for this year. The three nominees were Catherine Meurisse, Anouk Ricard and Alison Bechdel. It is the first time all three finalists have been women and the first time there have been two women winners in a row.
Anouk Ricard is an illustrator and comic book author, born in 1970 in the South of France. A graduate of the Arts-Déco de Strasbourg in 1995, Olivier Douzou published her first book with Éditions du Rouergue. She began comics in 2004 with Anna And Froga, a light-hearted children's series intended for Capsule Cosmique magazine and published in America by Drawn & Quarterly. Shortly after, she began creating another more adult comedy series, Commissaire Toumi, for Éditions Requins' Marteaux Ferraille magazine; both series were collected and published by Éditions Sarbacane. GQ France named one of the 25 Funniest Women in the country. She has continued to create comedy comics published by Gallimard, Cornélius, Arte/Casterman and 2042, while also working in illustration, has exhibited her paintings drawings as well as micro-publishing magazines. She mostly does that with l'Articho Publishing, for whom she has produced a card game, a fanzine and a printed collection of her various digital works. In 2022, her graphic novel Animan from Exemplaire Publishing received the Special Jury Prize at that year's Angoulême festival. The sequel, Fabienne, will be released this October.
Fellow nominees Catherine Meurisse is a cartoonist for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. She is a member of France's Academy of Fine Arts and has been a finalist several times before. Alison Bechdel is an American graphic novelist and cartoonist, best known for her controversial and frequently banned graphic novel Fun Home and for popularising the Bechdel Test, a base-level judgment of fiction.