Announcing the Winners of the 19th Annual Doug Wright Awards

Posted on 30. Apr, 2023 by in Uncategorized

The winners of the 19th annual Doug Wright Awards were announced on Saturday, April 29th, at the historic Arts & Letters Club, in Toronto. The event was a featured event of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and was hosted by the cartoonist and frequent DWA M.C. Dustin Harbin to an at-capacity crowd of more than 100 people. 
 
Here are this year’s winners:
 
The Doug Wright Award for best book
(Sponsored by Strange Adventures)
Ducks
Kate Beaton 
Drawn & Quarterly
 
The Nipper: The Doug Wright Award for emerging talent 
(Sponsored by Koyama Provides)
Jonathan Dyck
Shelterbelts
Conundrum Press
 
The Pigskin Peters: The Doug Wright Award for best small- or micro-press book 
(Sponsored by Broken Pencil
Where Have You Been?
Ivana Filipovich (t: Ivana Filipovich/Andrea Hankinson)
Self-published
 
The Egghead: The Doug Wright Award for best kids’ book 
You Know, Sex
Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth
Triangle Square
 
Kate Beaton previously won both the best book award and The Nipper for Hark, a Vagrant, and was also previously nominated for best book and The Pigskin Peters. Fiona Smyth was nominated for best book in 2019, the same year she was inducted into The Giants of the North.
 
This year’s winners in each category received a trophy (or bowler hat, in the case of the Pigskin Peters) and a small cash prize. The winner of The Nipper also received a week-long stay at the Valleyview Artist Retreat, in Caledon, Ontario. 
 
This year’s Giants of the North inductee was Henriette Valium (1959–2021), a comic book artist and painter, and the winner of the 2017 Pigskin Peters award, for his book The Palace of Champions. Valium was inducted in a moving speech by Marc Tessier, author, publisher, and photographer, and a member of the Montreal comix community. Valium’s children accepted the award on his behalf. Andy Brown, of Conundrum Press, also announced a crowdfunding campaign to reprint a box set of Valium’s work.
 
Doug Wright Award founders Brad Mackay and Seth appeared onstage to pay tribute to Doug Wright and discuss the crowdfunding campaign for the publication of The Collected Doug Wright Volume 2, running now until May 18th. The book will cover the second half of Wright’s cartooning career and include hundreds of examples of his strip Doug Wright’s Family (a.k.a. Nipper), one of the most beloved Canadian comic strips of all time. 
 
Their talk fit the evening’s theme of recognizing and supporting those who have come before you and those who will come after—a theme furthered by a humorous but meaningful presentation by Jordan Reg. Aelick, the library manager of the Canada Comics Open Library, and in a tribute to two recently deceased DWA winners, Scott Carruthers and Mandi Kujawa.
 
The evening was the Doug Wright Awards’ return to an indoor venue following two years of a on online ceremony and one year outdoors, and was broadcast live on YouTube to an additional hundred viewers.
 
As always, the Beguiling comic shop, in Toronto, has put together a special shopping list of all of this year’s DWA nominees on its Web site. 
 
Congratulations to all of this year’s winners.

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