AAEC-feed Awards Editorial cartooning

Matt Davies Awarded Herblock Prize (Again)

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D. D. Degg March 7, 2019 1 minute 5 comments

Matt Davies, editorial cartoonist for Newsday, has won all the big awards in his profession,
so the only thing to do now is start repeating.

Matt Davies is the editorial cartoonist for Newsday in NY and has won both the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism prize. In 2004 he was awarded the first ever Herblock Prize.

In 2017 he received the National Headliner Award and was also a runner up/finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and 2016.

The Herb Block Foundation has announced that Matt will receive the 2019 Herblock Prize, making him the first to be honored twice.

The Herb Block Foundation revealed the winner today.

Judges called Davies “a veteran cartoonist working at the top of his game,” adding that they were impressed by the “strength and consistency” of his portfolio.

Like a proud parent Newsday boasts about the distinction.

Newsday editorial cartoonist Matt Davies has been named the 2019 Herblock Prize winner — the first two-time recipient of the prestigious honor.

Davies will receive a $15,000 after-tax cash prize and a sterling silver Tiffany trophy in a ceremony set for May 2 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Jake Tapper, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent and himself a sometime political cartoonist, will deliver the annual Herblock Lecture at the ceremony.

The Foundation noted:

Any hesitance on the part of the judges to break precedent by awarding a previous winner was overcome by the strength and consistency of Davies’s portfolio. A veteran editorial cartoonist working at the top of his game, Davies has a unique, trademark style of drawing that effectively conveys humor without making light of the serious issues at hand.

He doesn’t just settle for the same old visual metaphors so commonly found in editorial cartooning today, and he does not insult his reader’s intelligence with over-labeled work.

The judges were impressed by the wide range of topics Davies tackled, including many that did not appear in other portfolios. He approaches topics with succinct precision and visual wit.