Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Angoulême, Catherine Meurisse, greand prix, Julie Doucet, penelope bagieu

Bagieu, Doucet & Meurisse Nominated For Angoulême Comics Grand Prix

Published Tue, 01 Mar 2022 07:41:10 -0600

The Angoulême Grand Prix is a lifetime achievement award established in 1974 given annually during the Angoulême International Comics Festival to a comics author, and is considered the greatest prize in the comic book artform and industry. Awarded mainly to French and Belgian authors, but also to other nationalities, only two women, Florence Cestac and Rumiko Takahashi, have ever won the prize. Since 2014, the Grand Prix of the Angoulême International Comics Festival has been awarded following a vote by the community of professional comics authors.

The first stage of the selection of the 2022 Grand Prix, which took place from 21 to 27 February, has just ended. The three nominated comic book creators are Pénélope Bagieu, Julie Doucet and Catherine Meurisse. Catherine Meurisse was previously nominated, but this is the first time the Festival has had an all-women shortlist. There are only a handful of times when they have had any women on it.

Pénélope Bagieu was born in 1982 in Paris. After studying at the Arts Déco in Paris, then at Central Saint Martins in London, she created Ma vie est tout à fait fascinante in 2007, a webcomic in which she describes the daily life of a young Parisian with a humour and grace. The success of the collection led her to create her first long story with Cadavre exquis, in 2010, then her first biography with California Dreamin' which won the Harvey Award in 2018. In 2016, she created a series of comic book portraits of women under the title Culottées, which won an Eisner Award in 2019, and was adapted into an animated version by France TV. In 2020, she adapted Roald Dahl's novel The Witches and in 2022 she tackled her first autobiography with Les Strates.

Julie Doucet, born in 1965 in Montreal studied visual arts at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal in the early 1980s, and enrolled at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she completed a certificate in printing arts. During her studies, she discovered comics and began publishing a photocopied fanzine: Dirty Plotte, in which she documented her daily life, her dreams and her anxieties in French and English. The title was picked up in 1991 by the Montreal-based publisher Drawn & Quarterly, and, after living in New York, Seattle and Berlin, Julie Doucet returned to Montreal where she lives and works, working in graphic arts. Her work, which she publishes in limited editions in silkscreen, continues to be published by Drawn & Quarterly. In 2018, essayist Anne-Elizabeth Moore published a study on Julie Doucet's work (Sweet Little C-nt: The Graphic Work of Julie Doucet), which she sees as a precursor of a new feminism in comics.

Catherine Meurisse was born in 1980. After studying modern literature, she went on to study at the École Estienne and then at the École nationale supérieure des Arts décoratifs in Paris. Catherine Meurisse is a draughtswoman, author, cartoonist, reporter and illustrator of children's books who has worked for fifteen years for La Monde, Liberation, Les Echos, L'Obs and especially to Charlie Hebdo..After creating comic books My Men of Letters, The Art Bridge, Modern Olympia and Funny Women, she published in 2016 Lightness, the story of a return to life, to drawing and to memory, after the attack against Charlie Hebdo which she survived. Recent works also include Shameless Scenes From Hormonal Life, The Great Spaces, telling the story o her childhood in the countryside, combining countryside aesthetic and political awareness of the rural landscape. She also The Story of Alexandre Dumas, The Young Woman and the Sea and in 2020 a major retrospective exhibition was devoted to her at the BPI of the Centre Pompidou. This led to Catherine Meurisse becoming the first comic book creator to become a member of the Académie des beaux-arts. She was also nominated for the Grand Prix last year, losing out to Chris Ware.

The Angoulême Comics Grand Prix will be awarded at Angoulême International Comics Festival from the 17th to the 22nd of March, 2022.

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