Category: awards

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!

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

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.

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!

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.