Pénélope Bagieu, Julie Doucet, Catherine Meurisse, a female trio in the running for the 2022 Grand Prix of the Angoulême Festival

Pénélope Bagieu, Julie Doucet and Catherine Meurisse are the three finalists for the 2022 Grand Prix of the Angoulême International Comics Festival, the organizers announced in a press release. “A first trio of nominees, in the history of the Grand Prix du Festival, exclusively composed of female authors”, states the press release.

Julie Doucet is nominated for the first time, while it is for Pénélope Bagieu, a second nomination and for Catherine Meurisse a third.

Since 2014, the Grand Prix of the Angoulême International Comics Festival has been awarded following a vote by the community of professional comic book authors. The first round took place between February 21 and 27. The same college of authors and authors will have to decide in a second round, from March 2 to 8, to elect the 2022 Grand Prix, which will be announced on March 16.

Pénélope Bagieu, almost forty years old, first became known in 2007 with My life is quite fascinating, a drawn blog in which she recounted her daily life with humour. She then published a series of albums Josephinewhich is a big success in bookstores.

In 2015, she published her first biography, California Dreamin’ (Gallimard BD) which won him a Harvey Award in 2018. The designer embarked on a new project a year later, The Culottesin which she recounts in a few lines the existence of women who have changed the world.

Translated into 20 languages ​​and crowned with an Eisner Award in 2019, the two volumes of culottes have been adapted into an animated version by France Télévisions.

In 2020, Pénélope Bagieu adapts the famous novel by Roald Dahl, Holy Witches et en 2022 she publishes Strata, his first autobiographical comic strip.

Catherine Meurisse, 42, is another major figure in comics in France. Designer, author, caricaturist, reporter and illustrator of children’s books, Catherine Meurisse drew for the press for fifteen years, collaborating with Le Monde, Liberation, Les Échos, L’Obs… and Charlie Hebdo. The designer also publishes albums, such as My Men of Letters, The bridge of Arts (Sarbacane), Modern Olympia (Futuropolis) and funny women (Dargaud, with Julie Birmant).

In 2016, a year after the Charlie Hebdo attack from which she narrowly escaped, she published Lightness, an album in which she recounts her experience and above all comes back to life, through drawing and art. She has since published The great outdoors (Dargaud), evocation of his childhood in the countryside, then in 2019, Delacroixa graphic adaptation of the memoirs of Alexandre Dumas, a great friend of the painter Eugène Delacroix.

His new album, The Young Woman and the Sea questions the place of Man in nature and the use of art to capture disappearing landscapes. In 2020, a major retrospective was dedicated to her at the BPI of the Center Pompidou, and she became, the same year, the first comic book author to enter the Academy of Fine Arts.

Born in 1965 in Montreal, Julie Doucet is “one of the most important female comic strip writers of the end of the last century”, says the press release of the Angoulême Festival. The designer made her debut in comics with a photocopied fanzine: Dirty plot, in which she recounts in French and English her daily life, her dreams, her anxieties. This diary in comics was published under the same title in 1991 by the publisher Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal.

After living in New York, Seattle and Berlin, the designer returns to Montreal and turns to a more pictorial expression, “closer to graphic arts”with collages, poetry, photo novels. “The essayist Anne-Elizabeth Moore published in 2018 a study on the work of Julie Doucet (Sweet Little Cunt: The Graphic Work of Julie Doucet), which she sees as a precursor to a new feminism in comics”, specifies the Angoulême Festival.

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