The 2010 nominees for the prestigious Doug Wright awards, honoring the best in Canadian comics, were announced earlier today. The awards will be presented at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Sat. May 8, at 7 pm at the Toronto Reference Library’s new Bram & Bluma Appel Salon.

The Doug Wright Awards finalists for Best Book are:

Back + Forth by Marta Chudolinska (The Porcupine’s Quill)
George Sprott: (1894-1975) by Seth (Drawn and Quarterly)
Hot Potatoe by Marc Bell (Drawn and Quarterly)
Kaspar by Diane Obomsawin (Drawn and Quarterly)
Red: A Haida Manga by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Douglas and McIntyre)

The Doug Wright Awards finalists for Best Emerging Talent are:

Adam Bourret I’m Crazy
Michael DeForge Lose #1 (Koyama Press), Cold Heat Special #7 (Picturebox)
Pascal Girard Nicolas (Drawn and Quarterly)
John Martz It’s Snowing Outside. We Should Go For a Walk.
Sully The Hipless Boy (Conundrum Press)

The finalists for the 2010 Pigskin Peters Award (for unconventional, “nominally-narrative” comics) are:

Bébête Simon Bossé (L’Oie de Cravan)
Dirty Dishes by Amy Lockhart (Drawn and Quarterly)
Hot Potatoeby Marc Bell (Drawn and Quarterly)
Never Learn Anything From History by Kate Beaton
The Collected Doug Wright Volume One by Doug Wright (Drawn and Quarterly)

This year’s nominees were chosen by a five-member panel who chose from works released in the 2009 calendar year. The panel included: comics historian and author Jeet Heer; filmmaker Jerry Ciccoritti; cartoonist Chester Brown; Walrus comics blogger Sean Rogers; and writer and Sequential.ca publisher Bryan Munn.

The winners are chosen by a jury.