Canada Reads winner, Kate Beaton’s Ducks, takes home 2023 Doug Wright Award for best comic | CBC Books

Ducks by Cape Breton comic artist Kate Beaton has won the 2023 Doug Wright Award for best book.

The Doug Wright Awards annually celebrates excellence in comics across Canada, awarding four prizes — the best book award, the Nipper Award, the Pigskin Peters Award and the best kids’ book. 

Beaton‘s latest book Ducks became the first graphic memoir to win Canada Reads in 2023 when it was championed by Jeopardy! star Mattea Roach. Beaton launched her career by publishing the historical webcomic strip Hark! A Vagrant which previously won both the DWA best book award in 2012. 

In Ducks, Beaton leaves her tight-knit seaside Nova Scotia community to pay off her student debt working in the Albertan oil sands where she encounters harsh realities, including the everyday trauma that no one discusses.

The graphic memoir describes an intimate period of Beaton’s life, still she intended for Ducks to also reflect the story of her wider Cape Breton community and the harsh working conditions in places like Fort McMurray.

“A lot of the time, people engage with puppet versions of the place,” Beaton said in an interview with Mattea Roach and CBC Books, “I hope that by reading my book, they will get under the surface a bit, because you want to get to know a place deeply in order to bring about change. You have to think about the reality, the harder truths which are contradictory and not easy. That is what my book presents, the messiness of humanity.”

WATCH | Kate Beaton and Mattea Roach in conversation:

The Nipper Award, which recognizes emerging talent in comics, was awarded to Winnipeg-based cartoonist Jonathan Dyck for his book Shelterbelts.

The graphic novel weaves together scenes from the community — a pastor and his queer daughter contend with lost parish members, a librarian writes prescriptive notes in books for her patrons and young activists fight with a farmer over pipeline construction on his land.

The Pigskin Peters Award, which goes to the best small or micro-press book, went to Where Have You Been? by Canadian-Serbian cartoonist Ivana Filipovich. The book is a collection of short graphic stories set in former Yugoslavia and in Canada.

You Know, Sex by Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth won for best kids book. Written in a bright comic format, You Know, Sex is a modern sex-ed book which discusses puberty, adolescence and social justice. 

 A record 200 entries by Canadian authors and artists were submitted from dozens of publishers and self-published authors for this year’s awards. The winners received a trophy (or bowler hat, for the Pigskin Peters Award) and a small cash prize.