Penn State News reports Nora Krug‘s graphic memoir “Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home” has won the 2019 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize. The book, published by Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner last year, followed Krug as she returned to her hometown of Karlsruhe, Germany, and explored the emotional impact of researching what her family did during the Second World War.
The Prize jury, which includes members of various Penn State academic departments as well as student and alumni representatives, praised Krug’s “language [as] poetic, and her assemblage of fading photographs, letters, and vibrant illustrations evoke a palimpsest of history and memory. Employing collage in tandem with her personal illustration style, she negotiates historical space with her own artistic vision. The result is rich storytelling that winnows a human connection out of loss and reckoning. This graphic memoir feels part diary, part archival record, and the outcome is both personal and educational — about German identity — and about the collective cultural aftermath of the Holocaust.”
The jury also honored Tillie Walden’s sci-fi webcomic “On a Sunbeam,” which was collected in print by First Second Books last year. They called it “a stunning exploration of space, identity and love that is aesthetically sophisticated and connects with feelings of intimacy and escapism,” and “an engaging exploration both narratively and visually, simultaneously developing character and landscape within a boundless galaxy.”
Named after the late artist and storyteller Lynd Ward, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize is presented annually to the best graphic novel published in the previous calendar year by a living US or Canadian citizen or resident. Krug, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Le Monde, has lived in the UK and US since her late teens, and is an associate professor in the Illustration Program at the Parsons School of Design in New York. She will be presented with the $2500 prize and a two-volume set of Ward’s six novels at a ceremony being held this fall on Penn State’s University Park campus.
