Michael de Adder is the 2020 Herblock Prize Winner

For Immediate Release

WASHINGTON, DC, Wednesday March 4, 2020 – Michael de Adder is the 2020 Herblock Prize winner for editorial cartooning.

Michael de Adder has won numerous awards for his work including seven Atlantic Journalism Awards plus a Gold Innovation Award for news animation in 2008. He won the Association of Editorial Cartoonists’ 2002 Golden Spike Award for best editorial cartoon spiked by an editor and the Association of Canadian cartoonists 2014 Townsend Award. He has been nominated for four National Newspaper Awards and was shortlisted by the National Cartoonists Society for the Reuben Award in Editorial Cartoon category.

Michael de Adder was born in Moncton, New Brunswick. He studied art at Mount Allison University where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in drawing and painting. He began his career working for The Coast, a Halifax-based alternative weekly, drawing a popular comic strip called Walterworld which lampooned the then-current mayor of Halifax, Walter Fitzgerald. This led to freelance jobs at The Chronicle-Herald and The Hill Times in Ottawa, Ontario. After freelancing for a few years, he landed his first full time cartooning job at the Halifax Daily News. 

After the Daily News folded in 2008, de Adder became the full-time freelance cartoonist at New Brunswick Publishing. He was let go in 2019 for his political views with one of these being his cartoons depicting U.S. President Donald Trump’s boarder policies. Currently, de Adder works for Counterpoint, a United States based newsletter that celebrates a diverse field of cartoonists from different political perspectives as well as the Toronto Star and the Halifax Chronicle Herald.

He has over a million readers per day and is considered the most read cartoonist in Canada.  He is a past president of the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists and spent five years on the board of the Cartoonists Rights Network.

The Herblock Prize is awarded annually by The Herb Block Foundation for “distinguished examples of editorial cartooning that exemplify the courageous independent standard set by Herblock.” The winner receives a $15,000 after-tax cash prize and a sterling silver Tiffany trophy. Michael de Adder will receive the Prize on April 6th in a ceremony held at the Library of Congress. Jose Andres, chef and founder of World Central Kitchen (WCK) a non-profit devoted to providing meals in the wake of natural disasters, will deliver the annual Herblock Lecture at the awards ceremony.

This year’s judges were Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, creator of the weekly political cartoon “This Modern World” and winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize; Michael Rhode, archivist and author, commentator on comics for the Washington City Paper and creator of the ComicsDC blog; and Eric Shansby, American cartoonist and children's book illustrator whose work appeared most prominently in The Washington Post.

The judges noted “There were many strong submissions in this moment of political crisis in America. The judges ultimately chose Michael de Adder for his elegant yet concise draftsmanship and his ability to distill complex issues into impactful visual statements. De Adder, who recently lost his job due to criticism of the American president, embodies Herblock’s standard of courageous independence, as defined in the award.”

The Herblock finalist for 2020 is Matt Lubchansky who will receive a $5,000 after-tax cash prize. The judges said “Matt Lubchansky is an up-and-coming artist whose work exemplifies the cadence and structure of a new generation. Their work was distinguished by a wide diversity of subject matter and a cleverly askew sense of humor.”