Peggy Adam wins the BD Zoom 2021 Prize for the album “Les sales gosses”
Secondary school pupils aged 15–19 selected Peggy Adamas the winner of the BD Zoom 2021 Prize.
This award seeks to highlight Switzerland’s wide array of French-language comic books while promoting an interest in reading. The winning author’s award will be presented this autumn by Ms Anne Emery-Torracinta, State Advisor for the Department of Public Education, Training and Youth and Ms Anna Franziska Becher, Delegate-General of the BNP Paribas Swiss Foundation, which was a founding partner of the project.
The book by Peggy Adam tells the story of six friends who come together during the summer holidays, and for whom it is an opportunity to do stupid things and discover each other’s secrets. Their friendship will enable them to find the resilience to face challenges and help them through their childhood. An account, inspired by the life of the author, who has been able to cross generations to engage the pupils.
In this sixth annual competition, the three finalists for the BD Zoom Prize were overwhelmingly female: Peggy Adam for Les sales gosses, Marina K. for Je suis grosse and Fanny Vaucher with Eric Burnand for Le Siècle d’Emma
The winner was chosen after an entire academic year of collaboration with 36 teachers representing 49 classes and more than 700 pupils from all teaching streams. The students read the six works, studied both their content and form in detail, and had the opportunity to meet the authors many times in class. In addition to discovering the rich expressive potential of this medium, reading the entries encouraged the young people to engage in dialogue on important social issues, made accessible through the universal language of the comic.
The BD Zoom Prize took place as it has every year, with individual visits in strict compliance with health regulations. Only the awards ceremony had to be modified. The authors published videos online and then the pupils voted remotely.
The BD Zoom Prize is part of the Department of Public Education’s active policy to make culture accessible to the students of the canton. It also complements the canton’s efforts to support the book industry in order to highlight the importance of illustration, comic books and posters from Geneva, which are part of Swiss intangible cultural heritage.
