The French-Iranian cartoonist, film director and painter Marjane Satrapi has been awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities 2024, as made public today by the jury in charge of awarding it.
The jury for this Award – convened by the Princess of Asturias Foundation – was chaired by Víctor García de la Concha and made up of Luis María Anson Oliart, Rosa María Calaf Solé, Irene Cano Piquero, Gabriela Cañas Pita de la Vega, Concepción Cascajosa Virino, Adela Cortina Orts, Estrella de Diego Otero, Miguel Falomir Faus, Taciana Fisac Badell, Álex Grijelmo García, Alma Guillermoprieto, Miguel Ángel Liso Tejada, Catalina Luca de Tena y García-Conde, Marchioness of Valle de Tena, Miguel Ángel Oliver Fernández, Enrique Pascual Pons, Carmen Riera i Guilera, Diana Sorensen and Óscar Loureda (secretary).
This candidacy has been proposed by María Sheila Cremaschi, director for Spain of the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts, an entity awarded the 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities.
Marjane Satrapi was born in Rasht (Iran) on November 22, 1969. In 1983, conditioned by the extremism of the 1979 Revolution, her parents sent her to Vienna to finish her studies at the French Lyceum in the Austrian capital. She later returned to Tehran and entered the school of Fine Arts, but, in 1994, before graduating, she moved to France. She studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg and subsequently moved to Paris. Marjane Satrapi is, according to specialists, one of the most prominent names in international comics, author of what is, for many, one of the best graphic novels ever published: Persepolis (2000), an autobiographical story that narrates his childhood and adolescence in Iran. It has been said that “few works have had such an ability to penetrate pop culture and, at the same time, be one of the best historical stories of our time.” Persepolis He won the Angoulême Coup de Coeur Award for best new author at the Angoulême Festival. In 2001, the second volume received, also in Angoulême, the award for best script. The third and fourth volumes achieved even greater popularity, establishing it internationally. In 2007 he teamed up with Vincent Paronnaud to turn the comic into an animated film. The adaptation won the Grand Prix of Critics at the Cannes Festival in 2007 and the César Award for best adapted screenplay in 2008, in addition to being nominated for best animated film at the 2008 Oscars. Other notable works by him are Embroidery (2003) (Embroidery2004) y Chicken with prunes (2004) (Chicken with plums2005), which was also adapted to film in 2011. In 2023 he coordinated the book Woman, life, freedom (Woman, life, freedom), in which—along with the political scientist Farid Vahid and the historian Abbas Milani, both Iranians, and the French reporter Jean-Pierre Perrin, as well as an international group of seventeen comic authors (including several Iranians and the Spanish Patricia Bolaños and Paco Roca) – illustrates the revolts that occurred in Iran following the murder, in 2022, of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the so-called “morality police”, and denounces the repression and lack of human rights that, according to Satrapi, he suffers Iranian society, especially women, because of the regime. The Persian version of this book is accessible online for free to all Iranians.
In addition to the film adaptation of PersepolisSatrapi has directed the films The Band of Jotas (The Jotas Gang2013), The Voices (The voices2015) y Radioactive (2020), a biography regarding the scientist Marie Curie. Another of the disciplines in which she has stood out has been painting, with important exhibitions in Parisian galleries such as the Jérôme de Noirmont gallery. This same year, a tapestry designed by Satrapi commissioned by National Furniture of France is exhibited at the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris on the occasion of the upcoming Olympic Games in Paris. Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of France, Marjane Satrapi is a doctor Honorary by the Belgian universities UC Louvain and KU Leuven. In 2024 she was elected member of the French Academy of Fine Arts
The Princess of Asturias Awards are intended, according to their Regulations, to reward “the scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanitarian work carried out by people, institutions, groups of people or institutions at the international level.” In accordance with these principles, the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities will be awarded to “the work of cultivating and perfecting the sciences and disciplines considered as humanistic activities and those related to social media in all its expressions.”
In this edition, a total of 47 candidates from 15 nationalities competed for the Communication and Humanities award.
This was the second of the eight Princess of Asturias Awards that are awarded this year, in which they celebrate their forty-fourth edition. Previously, the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts was awarded to the singer and composer Joan Manuel Serrat. In the coming weeks, those corresponding to (in order) Sports, Social Sciences, Letters, International Cooperation, Scientific and Technical Research and Concord will be decided.
The Princess of Asturias Awards ceremony will be held, as is traditional, in the month of October in a solemn ceremony presided over by Their Majesties the King and Queen of Spain, accompanied by Their Royal Highnesses the Princess of Asturias and the Infanta Doña Sofía.
Each Princess of Asturias Award is endowed with a sculpture by Joan Miró – the representative symbol of the award –, an accrediting diploma, a badge and the cash amount of fifty thousand euros.
