Sébastien Bordenave / Photo credits: JOEL SAGET / AFP 6:40 p.m., January 24, 2024, modified at 6:41 p.m., January 24, 2024

The jury of the Angoulême international comics festival delivered its verdict on Wednesday evening: the British Posy Simmonds is the winner of the 2024 edition of the Grand Prix, 50 years after the creation of this world-famous festival.

55 years of career for the most literary of cartoonists.

Illustrator of children's books, press cartoonist, writer, the British Posy Simmonds won the 2024 Grand Prix of the Angoulême international comics festival on Wednesday evening, and as such becomes the first Briton to receive this award, 50 years old right after the creation of the festival.

The list of nominees included the Frenchwoman Catherine Meurisse, ex-

Charlie Hebdo

, and the American Daniel Clowes.

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Author of “Gemma Bovery”, “Tamara Drewe”

Born in 1945 in the United Kingdom, Posy Simmonds is notably the author of

Gemma Bovery

, first published as a weekly serial in the

Guardian

, then adapted into a graphic novel.

In France, the comic strip was released in 2000, director Anne Fontaine made a film about it in 2014 with Fabrice Lucchini in the lead role.

Tamara Drewe

 is also a major comic strip by Posy Simmonds, released in France in 2008 by Denoël Graphic. Stephen Frears adapted it for the cinema two years later.

Her British humor, caricatured but lucid, is often compared to Claire Bretécher.

Like the cartoonist for the

Nouvel Observer

, she works in the newspaper 

The Guardian

to draw with tenderness and a hint of misanthropy the progressive British middle class which she herself describes as "Shetland left".

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The winner subject of an exhibition until April 1

Currently and until April 1, Posy Simmonds is the subject of a free Parisian exhibition at the Public Information Library of the Pompidou Center: “Posy Simmonds, drawing literature”.

His latest comic strip is called 

True Love

 : his first graphic novel released in 1981 but published for the first time in French.

The album also includes her most emblematic drawings, new graphic novels and a long interview with the author in the form of a self-portrait.