He still doesn't come back.
It is in "the Comic Strip Train" which brings him to Angoulême that Riad Sattouf, 44, reacts "hot" to his election as the Grand Prix of the city of Angoulême.
“
It's very simple,
confides the author of
The Arab of the Future
,
when I was a child, I dreamed of one day becoming a comic book author!
I dreamed of having lots of people at signings, lines of readers!
I dreamed that one day journalists from
Le Figaro
would ask me questions about my work!
But I admit I never dreamed of having the Grand Prix!!!
It seemed to me too extreme and too abstract!
Passing after Druillet Crumb Moebius, Bilal... it was unthinkable!
In the running for this high distinction with Catherine Meurisse and Alison Bechdel, he succeeds Julie Doucet.
The Arab of the Future, Les Cahiers d'Esther, The Poor Adventures of Jérémie, Les beaux gosses, Brutal Pascal...
Riad Sattouf's work has accumulated successes.
At 44, the itinerary of this Franco-Syrian artist looks a bit like a fairy tale.
The man who won the César for best first film in 2010 for
Les Beaux Gosses
, a jubilant comedy about young people, triumphed in comics in 2014 with his fictionalized autobiography of a childhood spent between Syria and Brittany
The Arab of the future
, sold more than three million copies and translated into twenty-three languages.
He has just published the last volume.
The six parts of this intimate adventure form an almost Pirandellian whole, in which the author of
Retour au collège
(2005) and the series
Les Cahiers d'Esther
plays with the codes of autobiography, stages his memories of a dizzying way to recount the family trauma that affected him when he was only a Breton teenager in the France of the early 1980s.
Hergé's oneirism
Born in 1978, the author studied applied arts in Nantes, then animation cinema in Paris, at the Ecole des Gobelins.
Multi-award winning in Angoulême, Riad Sattouf twice won the Fauve d'or for best album in 2010 with
Pascal Brutal
and in 2015 the first part of
The Arab of the Future,
the last volume of which is in the official selection this year.
A fervent admirer of Hergé, the artist shared the Place des Vosges studio with Joann Sfar, Christophe Blain, Mathieu Sapin and Marjane Satrapi, a bit like the creator of Tintin in the heyday of the Hergé studios on Avenue Louise in Brussels. .
“Basically, what struck me deeply in Tintin were these dream scenes,”
confided Riad Sattouf to
Figaro.
Today, he is living a waking dream.
