Who will succeed Julie Doucet for the 2023 Grand Prix of the Angoulême festival?
The community of professional comic strip writers and authors has come out in favor of Catherine Meurisse, Riad Sattouf and Alison Bechdel.
At the end of a second round, which will be held until January 17, the winner will be announced on the evening of January 25, on the occasion of the official opening of the Festival.
Catherine Meurisse
Among the names retained, Catherine Meurisse was already approached last year to chair the event.
The one who moves us with her autobiographical stories
La Légèreté
or
Les Grands Espaces
and who sharpens our minds with humor, was born in 1980 in Niort.
Catherine Meurisse studied at the École Estienne and then at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
With her diploma in hand, she began her career in the press and joined the very private club of
Charlie Hebdo
team designers .
The author of the noticed
My men of letters
(sold in more than 150,000 copies), an album retracing a humorous, almost irreverent panorama of French literature, has a sense of formula, accustomed to sketching human comedy into a drawing.
This distant cousin of Bretécher seduces many readers with her personal vision of the history of French literature.
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La Case BD: The Great Outdoors or nature magnified by the imagination of painters
With
Le Ponts des Arts
in 2012, she studies, always with the same sense of humor, the links between painting and writing.
This time it is the authors and critics that it stages, from Diderot to Deleuze, via Proust and Ruskin.
Their artistic preferences are scrutinized.
She continues her momentum with
Modern Olympia
(ed. Futuropolis), a delirious guided tour of the Musée d'Orsay.
Narrowly escaping the attack on
Charlie Hebdo
on January 7, 2015, she published
La Légèreté,
a poignant and humorous album, exploring the long road to reconstruction that goes through beauty.
With
Les Grands Espaces,
published in 2018, the designer evokes her bucolic childhood, made up of a thousand scents, learned discoveries, observation, freedom, immense and green playgrounds, marked by reading and painting.
She just published
Human Too Human
, where she stages the illustrious thinkers Descartes, Voltaire, Machiavelli, Kant or Spinoza in comical situations of everyday life composing relevant, hilarious stories of a tasty intelligence.
In 2020, Catherine Meurisse was elected by the Academy of Fine Arts to the chair of Arnaud d'Hauterives (1933-2018) in the painting section.
Alison Bechdel
Born in 1960, the American designer has lived for more than thirty years in Vermont, in the countryside, after spending her twenties in the cultural ferment in New York and Minneapolis.
Addicted to sport, she recently delivered a fascinating autobiography articulated around physical exercise with The Secret of Superhuman Strength, her third graphic novel in the 2023 official selection, for which her partner, Holly Rae Taylor, provided the coloring.
In 2006, his first graphic novel,
Fun Home
, focusing on analyzing his relationship with his father and then his mother, was a hit.
Voted best book of the year by
Time Magazine
, the book becomes a musical and triumphs on Broadway, winning no less than five Tony Awards (including Best Musical).
The designer gave her name to the Bechdel test, which measures the degree of feminism in films.
Riad Sattouf
The Arab of the Future, Les Cahiers d'Esther, The Poor Adventures of Jérémie, Les beaux gosses, Brutal Pascal...
Riad Sattouf's work has accumulated successes.
At 44, the itinerary of this Franco-Syrian artist looks a bit like a fairy tale.
The man who won the César for best first film in 2010 for
Les Beaux Gosses
, a jubilant comedy about young people, triumphed in comics in 2014 with his fictionalized autobiography of a childhood spent between Syria and Brittany
The Arab of the future
, of which he has just published the last volume.
Born in 1978, the author studied applied arts in Nantes, then animation cinema in Paris, at the Ecole des Gobelins.
Multi-award winning at Angoulême, Riad Sattouf has twice won the Fauve d'
Pascal Brutal
and in 2015 the first part of
The Arab of the Future,
the last volume of which is in the official selection this year.
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Collaborator at
Charlie Hebdo
from 2004 to 2012, with his column
The Secret Life of Young People
, observer without taboo since 2016 of the life of the young Esther in the columns of
Obs,
initiative declined in seven albums
,
Riad Sattouf has forged a creation abounding marked by his discerning eye and steeped in humour.
Without forgetting the hypersexed character Pascal Brutal who in the pages of
Fluide Glacial
hardly bothers with proprieties.
"
In all his work, in
Les Cahiers d'Esther
as in
The Secret Life of Young People,
the designer with millions of albums purifies the world of his pretentious jargons and his overhanging phraseologies.
It reveals the postures and the absurdities of the eminences to touch the essence of things and humans
,” wrote Christophe Deloire, secretary general of
Reporters Without Borders
in his editorial for the album devoted to Riad Sattouf, in 2020.