Thursday, January 28, the winners of the inaugural Mahmoud Kahil Awards were announced in Beirut:
The main awards were presented in five categories: Editorial cartoons, graphic narratives, comic strips, graphic illustrations & infographics, and children’s book illustrations.
Winners included Jordanian Amjad Rasmi, who took the Editorial-cartoon Prize; Egyptians Ahmad Nady, Ganzeer, and Donia Maher took the Graphic Novel Prize for The Apartment in Bab El Louk; Jordanian Mohamad Al-Muti took the comic strips prize for “The Handsome Sad Mysterious Man”; Lebanese illustrator Bahij Jaroudi took the Graphic Illustration category for “Last Breath”; and the winner in the Children’s Book Illustrations category was Lebanese illustrator Azza Hussein.
Samples of their work, and interviews with the artists, can be found by clicking on their names.
There was also an Arabic Comics Guardian Award, which went to Egypt’s TokTok magazine and a Lifetime Achievement Award for Syrian artist Loujaina al-Assil.
According to organizers, there were 200 submissions from eleven different countries. They were judged by seven jury members: Patrick Chapatte, Imad Hajjaj, Jihad el-Khazen, George Khoury, Majdi Ashafi’, Michelle Standjosfski, and Habib Haddad.
The growing number of awards for Arab comics and graphic novels — at International Comics Book Festival of Algeria (FIBDA); at the Cairo Comix Festival; and now as part of the Arab Comics Initiative at the American University in Beirut — amply demonstrates the vibrancy of the Arabic comix scene.
The film that played at the awards ceremony (with English subtitles):
You can find more:
At the twitter feeds @KahilAward and @kahilcartoons.
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