Riad Sattouf
Riad Sattouf (; born 5 May 1978) is a French cartoonist, comic artist, and film director. Sattouf is best known for his award-winning graphic memoir pentalogy "L'Arabe du futur" ("The Arab of the Future") and for his award-winning film "Les Beaux Gosses" ("The French Kissers"). He also worked for the satirical French weekly "Charlie Hebdo" for ten years, from 2004 to mid-2014, publishing drawing boards of one of his major works "La vie secrète des jeunes". Life and career. Riad Sattouf was born in Paris, to a Syrian father and French mother, and spent his childhood in  Libya and Syria, then returned to France to spend his teenage years in Brittany, studying in Rennes. An avid reader of cartoon books and periodicals, sent to him by his grandmother, he was fascinated by them. Although he was studying to become a pilot, he applied to study at École Pivaut and then Gobelins L'Ecole de L'Image to study animation. The famous cartoonist Olivier Vatine noticed his talent and introduced him to Guy Delcourt, the owner of Delcourt, a publisher specializing in cartoons. Delcourt published Sattouf's first book "Petit Verglas" based on a story line by Éric Corbeyran. In  a unique personal and humorous style, he narrated his own adolescent life observations in "Manuel du puceau" and "Ma Circoncision" published by Bréal Jeunesse Publishing House owned by Joann Sfar. The books were later reprinted by L'Association Publishing House. In "Ma circoncision", he denounced circumcision as a cruel and absurd act, superimposed on the context of the socio-political life in his ancestral Syria in the 1980s. He then published the "Jérémie" series in the cartoon collection "Poisson Pilote" published by Dargaud, resulting in three books of the series. "Jérémie" is the story of a young sentimental and unstable youth  growing to adulthood and is very autobiographical. It also appeared in "No sex in New York" in 2004 on the initiative of the French left-wing daily Libération. In 2005 he published "Retour au collège", an observational study of adolescents in a Parisian middle school, which was a big success. Meanwhile, Sattouf developed the fictional character Pascal Brutal, an embodiment of pure virility. The comedic "Pascal Brutal" series imagines France of the near-future as an anarchic, neoliberal dystopia where the hero's outlandish machismo is given free rein. From 2004 to 2014, he published a weekly strip in the  satirical French weekly "Charlie Hebdo" entitled "La vie secrète des jeunes", recounting anecdotal observations of young people in public places. He likened the strip to a fly-on-the-wall nature documentary, and rendered the speech of his subjects with careful attention to sociolinguistic variation. The strips have been republished in three volumes, one in 2007, the second in 2010 and the last one in 2013. In late 2014, he left Charlie Hebdo and moved to Le Nouvel Obs, a weekly magazine, with a new strip called Les cahiers d'Esther (Esther's notebooks), based on true stories told to him  by Esther A., a girl who was 9 years old when the strip started. Sattouf also experimented with film dubbing by giving his voice to a cartoon character in "Petit Vampire" designed by his friend, cartoonist Joann Sfar. Moving into filmmaking, he directed his first film entitled "Les Beaux Gosses" (also known by its English title "The French Kissers"). It was released on 10 June 2009 with great success in France and 1 million viewers in just 2 months. In it, Sattouf portrays the love life and coming of age of adolescence. The film was nominated for three César Awards  in 2010: Best Debut Film, Best New Male Actor (for Vincent Lacoste in the role of Hervé) and Best Supporting Actress (for Noémie Lvovsky in her role as Hervé's mother). It won the Gold Prize for Best Film Debut, Best Male Revelation for Vincent Lacoste and Anthony Sonigo, Best French Revelation for Direction and Production for Sattouf himself and the Jacques Prévert Prize for Best Scenario and Best Adaptation with his co-writer Marc Syrigas. In 2018, Riad Sattouf disclosed a "family secret" about his father, the main character of "L'Arabe du futur", being a fierce antisemitic working in  Saoudi Arabia, supporting death penalty, pan-arabism, and the islamist far right Baas movement of Hafez Al Assad. From November 24, 2018 to March 11, 2019, the Pompidou Center in Paris hosted a major retrospective of Sattouf's work, entitled "L'écriture dessinée" (or "Illustrated Writing", in English). An accompanying exhibit catalogue of the same title was published by Allary Éditions.