We present to you Julie Doucet, the Canadian author crowned Grand Prix of the Angoulême comic book festival

“I dedicate this prize to all women authors of the past, present and future,” said Canadian author Julie Doucet, fourth winner (for women) of the Grand Prix de la ville Angoulême, after Claire Bretécher (Prix du 10th anniversary in 1984), Florence Cestac (2000) and Rumiko Takahashi (2019). The Grand Prix has been awarded every year since 1974 to salute an entire body of work.

Julie Doucet won ahead of Pénélope Bagieu and Catherine Meurisse, already finalists in 2021. The Grand Prix was announced on Wednesday March 16 at the Angoulême theater, during an opening ceremony dedicated to Ukraine. The Festival takes place from March 17 to 20.

Since 2014, the Grand Prix d’Angoulême has been awarded by the community of professional comic book authors. In the running for the first time, Julie Doucet succeeds the American Chris Ware.

Born in 1965 in Montreal, Julie Doucet is a figure of alternative and feminist comics. The designer makes her debut in comics with her own fanzine Dirty Plottein which she recounts in black and white, with an expressive line, her daily life as a woman, her body, without taboos, but also her dreams.

The author was then an exception in an environment then still almost exclusively dominated by men. His diary in comics was published in 1991 in the form of a comic-book by the publisher Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal. This is the beginning for her of the recognition of her peers, like the cult author Art Spiegelman (Maus) or Robert Crumb.

In France, Jean-Christophe Menu, co-founder of the alternative comics publishing house L’Association, published her work in 1990. She was thus present in the very first collective of the structure, War Logic Comix. Followed in 1995 Ciborium of Criss!a collection of fragments, then four other books, including Monkey and the Living Dead (The Association, 1999).

In November 2021, The Association published Maxiplota 400-page anthology of his work, which brings together works produced between 1987 and 1999. After traveling between New York, Seattle and Berlin, the artist turned to other forms of expression, such as collages, poetry, the photo novel.

Active in comics over a rather short period, twelve years, Julie Doucet is nevertheless considered a tutelary figure of alternative comics, a “precursor of a new feminism in comics”according to Anne-Elizabeth Moore, who in 2018 published a study on the work of Julie Doucet.