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George Sprott and Hot Potatoe Win Doug Wright Awards!
by Dan
Graphica / May 10, 2010
The winners of the 6th annual Doug Wright Awards were announced at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) this weekend.
Founded in 2004, the annual awards recognize the best and brightest in English-language comics and graphic novels published in the previous year.
This year’s top honours included:
BEST BOOK: George Sprott: (1894-1975) by Seth (Drawn + Quarterly)
THE PIGSKIN PETERS AWARD: Hot Potatoe by Marc Bell (Drawn & Quarterly)
BEST EMERGING TALENT: Michael DeForge Lose #1 (Koyama Press)
The winners were decided by a jury comprised of Matt Forsythe (editor of Drawn.ca, winner of the 2009 Pigskin Peters Award for Ojingogo), Geoff Pevere (Toronto Star book critic; author of Mondo Canuck) Fiona Smyth (artist; cartoonist) and Carl Wilson (editor/writer Globe and Mail, author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste).
Speaking on behalf of the jury, Pevere praised the Best Book winner George Sprott as "a portrait of a character, of a country…a country that is no longer with us," adding that:
It is a work about memory, a work about culture, a work about the past and a work about the future.
Speaking for Wright Awards nominating committee, which chooses the annual Pigskin Peters Award, Matt Forsythe described Hot Potatoe as "a collection of seven years of work that is insulting and hilarious and sarcastic and sincere," and continued that it has "influenced a whole wave of comics and artists – myself included."
Congratulations to all the winners!