Kate Beaton won the Jan Michalski Prize, a Swiss award for world literature, for her graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.
Beaton’s book, published in the U.S. in 2022 by Drawn & Quarterly, is the account of her time working in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, a job she took to pay off student loans. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the memoir as “a fascinating, harrowing, unforgettable book about a place few outsiders can comprehend.”
The jury for the award called the book “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” and “a profoundly moving masterpiece thanks to the courage it embodies.”
Peggy Burns, the publisher of Drawn & Quarterly, said in a statement, “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.”
The Jan Michalski Prize, established in 2009, is open to “works of all literary genres, fiction or non-fiction, irrespective of the language in which [they are] written.” Previous winners include Aleksandar Hemon for The Lazarus Project and Olga Tokarczuk for The Books of Jacob.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
