Kal is the international award-winning editorial cartoonist for The Economist and the Baltimore Sun. In a distinguished career that spans 35 years, he has created more than 8,000 cartoons and 140 magazine covers. His résumé includes six collections of his published work, international honours, awards in seven countries and one-man exhibitions in six. In 2015, he was named as a0 finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Kal was born Kevin Kallaugher in Norwalk, Connecticut on 23 March 1955. While studying Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, his illustrative talents were first displayed in a weekly satirical strip called ‘In the Days of Disgustus’ that he produced for the university newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.
Graduating with honours in 1977, he travelled to England to tour the country by bicycle, staying to coach and play for the semi-professional Brighton Basketball Club. As the club ran into financial difficulties, he began to search for jobs in cartooning.
Kal began doing tourist caricatures on Brighton Pier, as well as in London’s Richmond Park and Trafalgar Square, before The Economist took him onin March 1978 as the magazine’s first resident cartoonist. He also began contributing to satirical magazines such as The Digger, and was political cartoonist for the Oxford Sunday Journal in 1980. He began producing cartoons for the Observer in 1983, Today in 1986, and the Sunday Telegraph in 1987. He returned to his native USA in September 1988 to work on the Baltimore Sun, which syndicated his cartoons all over the world. From the USA, he continues to contribute cartoons and covers to TheEconomist. His cartoons have also appeared in the International Herald Tribune in Paris, Central Europe in Vienna, and Mediaweek in New York. He has won numerous awards for his work, including Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain Feature Cartoonist of the Year in 1982, Best Editorial Cartoon at the Witty World International Cartoon Festival, Budapest, in 1990, and the 2004 Thomas Nast Award. In February 2014, he was presented with the 2014 Overseas Press Club Award for Outstanding Cartoons on International Affairs. A past President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, he has also been British and European editor of Target magazine and was curator of ‘Worth a Thousand Words’, an exhibition at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland in 1995.
A highly successful exhibition at Chris Beetles Gallery in 1988 coincided with the publication of Drawn from The Economist. In 2013, Chris Beetles Gallery launched his book, Daggers Drawn: 35 years of Kal Cartoons inThe Economist, along with another successful selling show.
Kal has recently completed three months as artist-in-residence at The Masterworks Museum in Bermuda, where he created a 13-part satirical look at island life and politics.In the past year, he has also been on various speaking tours, addressing audiences in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul, San Francisco and Washington. In 2015, Kal was awarded the Herblock prize for Editorial Cartooning for a collection work in the Baltimore Sun and Economist. Kal was recently named as a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.
