The 2024 European Cartoon Award finalists have been announced. The finalists are Tjeerd Royaards (Netherlands), Steven Lectrr Degryse (Belgium) and Victor Solís (Mexico).
The European Cartoon Award was started by the European Press Prize and Studio Europa Maastricht in 2019 after the New York Times announced it would no longer run editorial cartoons. The purpose of the prize is to “award courage and quality in the field of cartooning and foster conversation on the topic of Europe.”
The award was judged by last year’s winner, cartoonist Ben Jennings (UK), journalist Catherine André (France), cartoonists Jip van den Toorn (Netherlands) and Sanaz Bagheri (Iran), and philosopher Stine Jensen (Netherlands). The winner will be announced on October 17 during the ECA’s Cartoons Day event held at The Hague. The winner will take home ?10,000.
Here are the finalist’s entries:
Catherine André, Chair of the Panel of Judges:
“The harvest of this year’s award was very rich, making our work of selecting the best ones for the 2024 ECA prizes incredibly challenging, at a time when we know how important – I’d say vital – cartoonists’ role in the preservation of the freedom of expression in sustaining independent journalism and democracy is. Examining all these entries that illustrate the past year’s main events, we went individually and collectively through hard work, in a spirit of conversation between us until, several rounds later, the year’s winners “imposed” themselves. And we have for sure grown from this!”