The 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning has been awarded to The New York Times team of freelance writer Jake Halpern, and cartoonist Michael Sloan. The duo were awarded for their series “Welcome to the New World,” a 20-part comic strip which chronicled a Syrian refugee family adjusting to their new lives in the United States.
“Welcome to the New World” was based on the experiences of a real family (whose names changed to protect their identity) that Halpern spoke with every few weeks: the strip, which ran from January to October 2017, was the first regularly published comic in the Times.
Halpern is an author, journalist, lecturer, and radio producer at NPR; he has also co-written young adult fiction with Peter Kujawinski, the most recent of which was 2017’s Edgeland. Sloan is the creator of the comic “Zen of Nimbus,” whose illustrations have appeared in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times Op-Ed Letters to the Editor column.
Sloan and Halpern beat out the other two finalists for the award, namely the San Francisco-based freelance cartoonist Mark Fiore, and the Detroit Free Press‘s Mike Thompson (you can view the work that landed them their nominations here and here).
According to Halpern, “Welcome to the New World” will be published in two book editions sometime soon, with one for adults from Metropolitan Books, and the other for kids published by First Second. For more on this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, head over to the list of winners on the official website.
