Kate Beaton’s graphic novel Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands adds yet another award for the shelf as it becomes the 2024 recipient of the Jan Michalski Prize for World Literature – and the first graphic novel to do so.
Begun in 2010, the Jan Michalski Prize is an annual award for works of fiction and non-fiction from across the globe. Prose, collections, poetry or illustrated works are submitted for consideration by members of the jury without the involvement of authors or publishers. Winners are announced in November following three rounds of voting, receiving a cash prize of 50,000 Swiss Francs (~$57,000) and their choice of a work of art to keep.
The 2024 pool up for the prize comprised works published between 2021 and 2024, with the finalists all coincidentally being released in 2022. Beaton’s graphic novel trumped Spanish novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance, by Irene Solà (released in English by Graywolf Press, 2022) and French novel Attaquer la terre et le soleil, by Mathieu Belezi (Le Tripode, 2022).
The jury described Ducks as:
“…a piercing and daring graphic memoir that sheds light on the hidden side of working conditions in the oil industry through the eyes of a young woman and recent graduate who is thrown into a toxic world because of economic hardship. Featuring clean lines and dialogue imbued with great narrative force, this visual autobiography is able to embrace the most sensitive and painful questions of our time – hypercapitalism, the environment, impoverishment, sexism and sexual harassment – without such a traumatic experience stifling her deep empathy for others in similar circumstances. A profoundly moving masterpiece thanks to the courage it embodies.”
With the award page adding:
“Beaton overwhelms us through her clarity and her ability to see the dysfunctional social dynamics mobilizing fear and poverty as engines of an exploitation that is embraced by the exploited, an illusion at the heart of this world. At the same time, she makes the ongoing ecological disaster the background of her graphic memoir. Through its rejection of both the culture of silence and a Manichean outlook, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands deals a major blow to the suffocating omertà of the oil industry, echoing the most acute contradictions and crises of our time.”
Jurors included British writer/biographer Jonathan Coe; Bulgarian author Kapka Kassabova, Italian writer/journalist Andrea Marcolongo; French writer, artist and director Valérie Mréjen; Angolan-Portuguese writer and professor Gonçalo M. Tavares; and Icelandic writer and lyricist Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson. The jury was presided over by publisher Vera Michalski-Hoffmann. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands was proposed for jury consideration by Jonathan Coe.
Beaton’s graphic novel, published by Drawn & Quarterly, has received immense acclaim since its debut in 2022 – with a 2023 French-language release by Casterman pushing it into critical selection lists in both North America and Europe. Its English release won two Eisners, two Ringos, an Ignatz and a Harvey in the US, as well as the Doug Wright Award in Canada. It was also the first graphic novel to win the Canada Reads competition. A paperback edition is expected in 2025.
Drawn & Quarterly publisher Peggy Burns welcomed the win, saying:
“It is so fitting to see Kate Beaton’s Ducks recognized by this visionary prize open to literature of all genres the world over because her cartooning in this memoir shows what the comics medium is capable of. Ducks could never have been anything other than a comic. And while the details of her story are Canadian, the book speaks to issues that people the world over are grappling with, like the toll of economic migration and the destruction produced by extractive industries.”
Graphic novels have made an appearance in the Jan Michalski Prize in the past but have never made it past the first round. These have included Mathieu Sapin’s Gérard: Five Years with Depardieu (Europe Comics, 2020/Dargaud, 2017); Lisa Mandel’s Une année exemplaire (Éditions Exemplaire, 2020); Catheurine Meurisse’s Lightness (Europe Comics, 2020/Dargaud 2016); and Chris Ware’s Building Stories (Pantheon 2012/Delcourt, 2014).
The Jan Michalski award was established in October 2009. Its guidelines require six judges serve an honorary two-year term – with five being international authors and one place reserved for an artist with an expressed interest in literature. They must also be comfortable in at least two languages. Each member can nominate two works each for consideration in that year’s prize.
The Jan Michalski Foundation in Montricher, Switzerland is a centre devoted to writing and literature, offering exhibitions and residencies at the foot of the Jura mountains. It was founded by publisher Vera Michalski-Hoffmann 2004 and named in memory of her husband (and co-publisher) Jan Michalski who died in 2002.
