On Saturday January 28, 2016 in Angoulême, Turkish cartoonist Ramize Erer is receiving the “Couilles au Cul” Award launched by Yan Lindingre, the editor in chief of the French Satirical Magazine Fluide Glacial as part of the Off Festival of Angoulême.
This act as a tribute to the difficult situation of Turkish cartoonists and Ramize’s fierce battle for feminism :
“With her satirical expressiveness and her courageous feminism, she had to flee her country where extremists threatened her children. She is the perfect representant of all creative Turkish minds, their resistance and thirst for freedom.”
The name of the Award (“Balls in the arse”) is voluntarily trivial and provocative and rewards the artistic courage of an editorial cartoonist. This prize is “a reminder that cartoonists’ work, as humorists, is to make people laugh. Cartoonist profession has been hurt, some of them paid for freedom of speech with the prize of their life, but cartoons have to remain funny. Cartoonists are the “guard of freedom of expression” but they are still humorists!“
In 2016 another member of Cartooning for Peace won the award, Willis from Tunis aka Nadia Khiari.
Read the press release (in French) here.
