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Pro Helvetia (Swiss Arts Council) Awards ‘Comic Creation Grant’ to Jared Muralt

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We are pleased to announce that Jared Muralt has been awarded a ‘Comic Creation Grant’ from Pro Helvetia (Swiss Arts Council) to support the creation of Ružica’s Last Summer with the Yugoslav Wars Research Cluster.

Jared Muralt is an award-winning Swiss illustrator and comic artist. Since the fall of 2023, he has been working with Ružica (not her real name) on a graphic novel about her childhood experiences of violence and discrimination during the Yugoslav Wars. The graphic novel is in development and the Berner Design Foundation showcased a selection of Jared’s concept drawings and character sketches at their annual BESTFORM exhibition in the spring of 2025.

Pro Helvetia is the Swiss Arts Council, a public foundation dedicated to supporting ‘the creation and dissemination of contemporary, professional art from Switzerland’. Of the thirty-three projects that applied for the grant in 2025, only seven were selected. Applicants came from all corners of Switzerland, and included projects in German, French, and Italian. This puts Jared and Ruzica’s Last Summer at the forefront of the Swiss comics and graphic narratives scene.

We are continually in awe of the extraordinary talent of our graphic artists working to make SCVN’s vision of bringing survivor-centred testimony to life. Thank you to the Swiss Arts Council for their support and our congratulations to Jared and the team!

For more information about Ružica’s Last Summer, visit our Yugoslav Wars Research Cluster page.

Selection of Jared’s drawings and sketches showcased at BESTFORM exhibition. Photo and image credit: Lea Moser and Jared Muralt, May 2025.

‘Against Forgetting – For Democracy’ prize awarded to Emmie Arbel and Barbara Yelin

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We are pleased to announce that both Barbara Yelin and Emmie Arbel have been awarded the prestigious “Against Forgetting – For Democracy” prize for 2025 by Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie e. V. (Against Forgetting – For Democracy). The prize honours their collaborative work on the graphic novel Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory.

The award recognizes individuals, initiatives, and/or projects whose outstanding work aligns with the association’s goals of developing appropriate forms of engagement with the past and/or right-wing extremism, and clearly demonstrating democratic values.

Barbara Yelin is being honoured for her artistic achievement and Emmie Arbel for her courage in revisiting and sharing her memories through a four-year creative collaboration. The recognition of this work underlines the power of graphic storytelling in keeping memory alive and fostering democratic awareness.

The award jury, chaired by former President of the Federal Constitutional Court Andreas Voßkuhle, shared this statement as part of the reasons for awarding Barbara and Emmie the prize:

“Barbara Yelin’s drawings convey history vividly and accessibly, in a way that text alone could not. At the same time, they do justice to the multifaceted nature of Arbel’s biography. 80 years after the end of the war, the book thus speaks to people of very different generations.”

Thank you to Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie e. V. for this recognition and congratulations to Barbara Yelin and Emmie Arbel for this well-deserved honour. The award ceremony will take place on 22 November 2025 in Berlin. Stay tuned for further updates!

Barbara Yelin
Emmie Arbel

Find more information on Against Forgetting – For Democracy e.V.’s website here.

‘Grand Prize of the German Academy for Children’s and Young Adult Literature’ awarded to Barbara Yelin

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We are delighted to announce that graphic artist Barbara Yelin is the winner of the 2025 annual Grand Prize of the German Academy for Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Deutsche Akademie für Kinder- und Jugendliteratur), granted in recognition for outstanding achievements in children and young adult literature.

Barbara Yelin

Grand Prize poster from the German Academy for Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Deutsche Akademie für Kinder- und Jugendliteratur), and Barbara Yelin. Photo credit: Martin Friedrich.

The award highlights her “multifaceted storytelling in the medium of comics – in drawing, dialogue and narrative text” and recognizes the culmination of her SCVN collaboration with Holocaust survivor Emmie Arbel in their initial graphic narrative, ‘But I Live’ and the expanded collaboration ‘Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory’.

Through translation, the academy outlines Barbara’s achievements as:

[Her] exceptional gift for biographical storytelling shines through once again – her keen powers of observation, her empathetic approach, and her richly atmospheric imagery. In addition to her artistic talent, Yelin is distinguished, among other things, by her profound social understanding and civic engagement.

Thus, she not only champions biographical remembrance work but also engages in art projects against the exploitation of refugees, antisemitism, hatred, and racism. With her artwork, Yelin makes unseen life stories and tragic events visible to us all. 

The award ceremony will take place on November 21st, 2025 in Volkach, Germany, facilitated by Dr. Winfried Bausback on behalf of the Bavarian State Ministry for Science and Art.

For more details about this award, please visit the Deutsche Akademie für Kinder-und Jugendliteratur’s website here: https://www.akademie-kjl.de/preise-auszeichnungen/grosser-preis

Join us in celebrating Barbara Yelin’s achievement and stay tuned for coverage of the award ceremony in November!

Updated on December 12th, 2025

Photos from the Grand Prize award ceremony in November 2025. Photo credit Andreas Kneitz and the Deutsche Akademie für Kinder- und Jugendliteratur e. V..

Congratulations on a beautiful ceremony and a well deserved award, Barbara!

New Funding from the National Holocaust Remembrance Program

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We are pleased to announce that our funding application to the National Holocaust Remembrance Program has been successful.


From left to right: Graphic artist Miriam Libicki, Holocaust survivor Rose Lipszyc, and Research Cluster Co-lead Mark Celinscak meeting for interviews and the documentary film at Rose’s home in Toronto, Ontario in the summer 2023. Photo credit: Chorong Kim.

Charlotte Schallié and her team have been awarded the Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism Program (MARP)’s National Holocaust Remembrance Program funding from Heritage Canada for their project, Developing Trauma-Informed Teaching Resources and Outreach Activities for Arts-Based Survivor Testimonies. The application was developed by Drs. Charlotte Schallié, Andrea Webb, Mark Celinscak, and Project Manager Jennifer Sauter with support from the following partners: Toronto Holocaust Museum Azrieli Foundation, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Memorial University of Newfoundland, University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy, University of Nebraska at Omaha, and Facing History and Ourselves.

The funding totals $129,769, and will be granted over a 5-year period. It will support the development of open-access educational resources, learning activities (in-person and online) and an art exhibition to accompany two non-fiction graphic novels by award-winning artist Miriam Libicki: A Kind of Resistance (published in the anthology But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust, New Jewish Press, 2022) and Two Roses (New Jewish Press, 2025). Created in close partnership with David Schaffer (Vancouver) and Rose Lipszyc (Toronto), respectively, Libicki’s graphic narratives shed light on child survivors’ lived experiences before, during, and after the Holocaust in Poland, Germany, and Romania. The target audience for these books is students in Grades 9-12. 

An excerpt from Two Roses (New Jewish Press, 2026), the story of Holocaust survivor Rose Lipszyc, by Miriam Libicki.

These two graphic novels have been conceived and co-created as part of two SSHRC-funded projects: Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education (2019-2022; https://holocaustgraphicnovels.uvic.ca/) and our Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (2022-2029).

The funding from the National Holocaust Remembrance Program will allow us to deepen and expand our current teaching resources (which also include two open-access short documentaries). Our goal is to create innovative evidence-based educational tools to help Canadian high school teachers apply a human rights framework and integrate Holocaust education into the secondary school curriculum.

We would like to thank all the partners who supported our vision and helped make this application a success!

Open Scholarship Awards 2025 – Dr. Andrea Webb receives Honourable Mention

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We are delighted to announce that Dr. Andrea Webb (University of British Columbia), SCVN Project Co-director, has won an Honourable Mention at the 2025 Open Scholarship Awards for creating the But I Live Educators’ Resource.


Recognized by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute and its partners, including the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project, Open Scholarship Award recipients demonstrate exemplary open scholarship via research, projects, or initiatives. Open scholarship incorporates open access, open data, open education, and other related movements that have the potential to make scholarly work more efficient, more accessible, and more usable by those within and beyond the academy. By engaging with open practices for academic work, open scholarship shares that work more broadly and more publicly.

In collaboration with UBC’s Bachelor of Education Program teacher candidates, Dr. Andrea Webb developed the online educational resources to accompany the graphic novel But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust.

This work was completed as part of their Community Field Experience (CFE) and was created by educators for educators. It draws on current classroom practices, pedagogy, and curriculum, and is designed for flexible implementation by teachers in a variety of classrooms.

For the complete list of 2025 Open Scholarship Awards recipients and honourable mentions, please click here.

Check out the But I Live Educators’ Resource here: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/butiliveresource/

Turtle Island Research Cluster Broadens the SCVN Community with Partnership Development Grant

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Building on the success of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives project, Drs. Shannon Leddy and Biz Nijdam have been successful in applying for additional funding to include genocide survivors from Greenland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Joined by Drs. Tim Frandy (Sámi, UBC) and Asta Mønsted (Kalaallit, formerly at UC Berkeley), and Frederik Byrn Køhlert (Edinburgh Napier University), this extension of the original Partnership Grant has received additional funding for three years through SSHRC’s Partnership Development Grant competition.

Background photo by Visit Greenland.

The Partnership Development Grant, Visual Storytelling in the Indigenous North, is an Indigenous-led project that connects storytellers, artists, and scholars from across the Circumpolar North to share stories of Indigenous survivance through comics, documentary film, podcasts, and digital media. Spanning Canada, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), Sápmi (Norway, Sweden, Finland), and Denmark, the project brings together First Nation, Métis, Inuit, and Sámi knowledge holders to co-create graphic narratives and arts-based public programming that highlight resilience, resurgence, renewal, revival, and resistance, and that amplify Indigenous voices.

The orientation for this work is rooted in Indigenous methodologies and a commitment to two-eyed seeing, focused on relationship-building, memory work, and land-based learning. Hosted by the UBC Comics Studies and Pop Culture Clusters in collaboration with the UBC Circumpolar Indigenous Storytelling Research Cluster and the Centre for Migration Studies, they are collaborating with museums, cultural institutions, educators, and artists to produce multilingual, multimodal storytelling that centre truth and reconciliation across geopolitical lines. Through their work they hope to continue and expand important dialogues about the ongoing cultural and social impacts of colonization and state sponsored efforts at genocide that have long been underexposed in the global North. Furthermore, they want to share stories that look to the future, particularly in the light of climate change, food security, and the need for sovereignty.

The team is excited to begin the first leg of this new research journey in March of 2026, when they will travel with their research team and graphic artists to the Arctic Winter Games in Whitehorse, Yukon. At this important event, which draws athletes and fans from across the circumpolar North, they hope to build on existing partnerships, deepen friendships, and meet plenty of new people, ideas, and experiences along the way. With a plan to produce some exciting new graphic novels and documentary films, they look forward to sharing their work in 2027 and 2028, and to the possibility of expanding their work into the future as well.

Learn more about the Turtle Island Research Cluster here.

Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize awarded to Barbara Yelin for ‘Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory’ – Nov 29, 2024

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We are honoured to announce that Barbara Yelin was awarded the annual Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize for children’s and young adult books by the State Office for Political Education in North Rhine-Westphalia for Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory. On November 29, 2024, Barbara was welcomed by Director of the Old Synagogue, Dr. Diana Matut, and the Mayor of Essen, Thomas Kufen, and presented with award by the Culture Minister, Ina Brandes, in Essen, Germany. Emmie Arbel also joined for the event, and participated in a reading with Barbara.

The Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize honors books that encourage children and young people to work for human rights, non-violent forms of conflict resolution, the integration of minorities and peaceful coexistence. It is the most important peace policy award for children’s and young adult literature in the German-speaking countries.

The prize was founded in 1982 and commemorates the former Federal President Dr. Gustav W. Heinemann, who gave special impetus to peace research and education.

For more information about the event and award, please refer to the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Nordrhein-Westfalen: https://www.politische-bildung.nrw/publikationen/heinemann-preis.

Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize awards ceremony on November 29, 2024 at the Old Synagogue in Essen, Germany (photography by MKW NRW / Meike Schrömbgens and Roland Zerwinski).

Turtle Island Research Cluster Co-lead Duncan McCue awarded $57,900 Canada Council for the Arts Grant

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  • Image gallery image

We are very pleased to announce Turtle Island Research Cluster Co-lead Duncan McCue has been awarded a Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) grant of $57,900 to expand the production of his graphic novel project to over one hundred pages.

McCue, an Anishinaabe journalist and professor at Carleton University, is writing the graphic novel in collaboration with acclaimed Anishinaabe artist Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley. Tentatively titled “Indians Do Cry: A Hockey Survivance Story,” the narrative tells the true story of a father and son, George Kenny and Mike Auksi, from the Lac Seul First Nation in northern Ontario. Revolving around testimony from Kenny and Auksi, “Indians Do Cry” explores the impacts of Indian Residential Schools, intergenerational trauma, and the healing power of the game of hockey.

McCue’s successful project is entitled “Graphic Art in Genocide and Human Rights (Turtle Island Cluster)” and the grant was confirmed in August 2024. It is being funded through the Creating, Knowing and Sharing: The Arts and Cultures of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples program of the CCA.

The grant funds will be used to compensate Pawis-Steckley for an additional 70 pages of artwork and McCue for his extra time involved in research, interviewing and authorship of the extended text. Funds will also be used for research materials, travel and counselling, if necessary.

Initial interviews and the draft manuscript for “Indians Do Cry” are complete. Pawis-Steckley is currently in the production phase of the book’s artwork, which is expected to be finished in the summer of 2025.

Check out the Turtle Island Research Cluster Page for more updates.