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Michael DeForge, Hartley Lin, John Martz, and Fiona Smyth lead this year’s Doug Wright Award nominees

Posted on 16. Apr, 2019 by Brad Mackay in Uncategorized

APRIL 16, 2019—Nominees were announced this morning for the 15th annual Doug Wright Awards, recognizing the best work and most promising talent in Canadian comics.

Finalists for the 2019 Doug Wright Best Book Award, presented for the best English-language book published in Canada, are:

A Western World (Koyama Press)
Michael DeForge 

Young Frances (Adhouse Books)
Hartley Lin

Evie and the Truth About Witches (Koyama Press)
John Martz 

Somnambulance (Koyama Press) 
Fiona Smyth 

Nominees for the 2019 Doug Wright Spotlight Award (a.k.a. The Nipper), presented to a Canadian cartoonist or team deserving of wider recognition, are:

Ariane Dénommé
100 Days in Uranium City (Conundrum Press)

Aminder Dhaliwal 
Woman World (Drawn & Quarterly)

Al Gofa
Dark Angels of Darkness (Peow Studio)

Victor Martins
Stay and You Don’t Have To be Afraid of Me 

Sylvia Nickerson 
All We Have Left Is This 

Eric Kostiuk Williams
Our Wretched Town Hall (Retrofit Comics)

Each year, the Doug Wright Awards nominating committee chooses to honour the year’s most experimental, unconventional, or avant-garde comic with the Pigskin Peters Award. This year’s nominees are:

Eggshell 2 (ddogg)
William Dereume

Winter’s Cosmos (Koyama Press) 
Michael Comeau 

Promising Jupiter
Ron Hotz 

310, 310 (Peow Studio)
Mushbuh 

Retomber 
Xiaoxiao Li

Finalists for this year’s awards were chosen from dozens of works published during the 2018 calendar year.  The nominating committee consisted of Ehab Arafeh, Alex Hoffman, Betty Liang, and Sabrina Scott. 

The jury for the 15th annual Doug Wright Awards includes: Rotem Diamant, president and librarian of the Canadian Comics Open Library; Rebecca Roher, winner of the 2017 Doug Wright Best Book Award for her full-length debut, Bird in a Cage; Joe Ollmann, also a past winner of the Best Book Award, for This Will All End in Tears, in 2007, and a 2018 Best Book Award nominee, for The Abominable Mr. Seabrook; and Dalton Sharp, a cartoonist and long-time wrangler for the Toronto Comic Jam.

Winners will be announced on May 11 at the 15th annual Doug Wright Awards, a featured event of the 2019 Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF), which takes place May 11–12 in and around the Toronto Reference Library.

Media inquiries: dougwrightawards@gmail.com