2025
Acceptance speech by May Linn Clement, Fritt Ord Prize 2025, 20 May 2025

May Linn Clement, Marvin Halleraker and Morten Mørland 2025

Dear everyone,

When asked to give an acceptance speech here today, I knew exactly who to ask for advice. It had to be Svein Gjerdåker, editor of Dag og Tid. In 2017, it was he who stood here and spoke when the newspaper was awarded the Fritt Ord Prize, and I sat in the audience.
Svein is always willing to help, and he gave me two specific tips.
1. Don’t talk about yourself. Say something of importance that applies to newspaper cartoonists in general.
2. The statuette that accompanies the prize is heavy. Don’t try to accept it with one hand, as if it were light as a feather. You would risk falling and looking foolish. Grip it with both hands and straighten your back.
That is why I want to say something that applies to newspaper cartoonists in general, but I will be using myself as an example.
Caricaturing and drawing people around me is something I have always done. It was often how my friends and I entertained each other when I was growing up in a new residential area in Norheimsund in the 1990s. We sketched our parents, neighbours and teachers – the authority figures in our lives.

One incident has stuck with me. I had drawn my teacher, and I had drawn him naked, just as I, an eleven-year-old girl, pictured him standing in front of me. Still, there was no doubt about who it was supposed to be. It definitely looked like him, right down to the horns and tail. I gave the drawing to a classmate during recess. We had a good giggle, and that was that.
A month later, I was going to attend a parent-teacher conference, and my father was with me. After reviewing the usual subjects, “May Linn struggles a lot in Norwegian and doodles too much in her maths book”, said the teacher, lifting up her folder on me, and presenting a piece of paper. It was the nude portrait I had given my friend. Someone had found the drawing and passed it along to the teacher, completely out of context.

So, there I was, wedged between two grown men who were not at all my target group for this caricature, and I had to explain myself. I still feel angry when I think about this episode. It still feels unfair: The same cartoon that made some girls laugh in delight in the moment, made grown men address me dead seriously a month later.
This was my own little caricature controversy, and I wish I had had someone on my side at the time, fighting for my cause.
Accordingly, tonight I would first like to thank my kind and wise editor, Svein Gjerdåker, who gave me a broad, safe platform from which to express myself.

Thank you to my colleagues at Dag og Tid, the sharpest, most unique writers and journalists in the country.
Thanks to my dear Odd Harald for the constant flow of good ideas and input you give me.
My gratitude also goes to Fritt Ord for using this prize to recognise the profession I love. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the board meeting when my name came up as a candidate for this prize from among all the Norwegian newspaper artists, many of whom are world-class.

It has been said that if newspapers were food, cartoons would be the salt. How do people react when they get a meal without salt?
They say: “This was bland. This was tasteless. This dish is missing something.” A newspaper without cartoons is just that. Bland and tasteless. Something is missing. So, to all the newspaper editors out there: Keep a saltshaker on your staff.

Thank you very much.