Angoulême ’23_ Riad Sattouf wins the Grand Prix

By Alistair Dabbs

The fiftieth model of the Angoulême Pageant Worldwide de Bande-Desinée (FIBD) obtained the celebration started last night by deciding on one in every of France’s private, Raid Sattouf, as winner of its excessive accolade for 2023.

As regular, the Grand Prix was awarded by the event’s opening ceremony, held the night time sooner than the four-day competitors opens to the general public. As a lot as 200,000 comic followers are anticipated to descend – and ascend – upon the hilly competitors metropolis 75 miles north-east of Bordeaux’s wine space between 26 and 29 January.

“To return after Druillet, Moebius, Bilal was too abstract and inconceivable” Riad Sattouf declared in an e mail dashed off to French newspaper Le Monde after the consequence was launched last night.

However the 44-year-old author-artist and film-maker was hardly an outsider for this 12 months’s Grand Prix, nor a stranger to the Angoulême awards podium. Exactly 20 years previously he obtained the competitors’s René Goscinny Award for youthful authors, and Amount 3 of his satirical assortment Pascal Brutal was chosen as Most interesting Album in 2010. In 2015, he obtained the ‘Fauve d’or’ for Most interesting Album as soon as extra, for his first amount of The Arab of the Future (revealed throughout the US by Pantheon.)

He was even caught up throughout the awards controversy by the notorious Angoulême competitors in 2016, having been included in an solely male shortlist. Sattouf publicly insisted that he far from that 12 months’s guidelines to allow nominations for ladies comics creators. The artistic route of FIBD modified dramatically throughout the years that adopted.

Sattouf’s most worthwhile assortment, The Arab of the Future, has purchased higher than 3 million copies and has been translated into higher than 20 languages. It is largely autobiographical, whereas moreover an unlikely comedy, recounting what it was favor to develop up with a significantly boorish Syrian father and 100% French mother, and being shuttled between nations and cultures.

Amount 6 of the gathering was France’s best-selling comics title of 2022 and is up for FIBD’s Most interesting Album award however as soon as extra this 12 months. The winners of all the awards lessons – Les fauves (‘the wild ones’)– will in all probability be launched on Saturday night.

Volumes 1 to 4 of The Arab of the Future and the first amount of his trendy assortment for girls, Esther’s Notebooks – the first amount merely acquired right here out throughout the US – may be present in English.

Along with his early work revealed in French satirical magazines equal to Fluide Glacial and Charlie Hebdo, Sattouf can be acknowledged in his native France for his modest side-career as a movie writer and director. In 2004, he began drawing a cartoon assortment for Charlie often called The Secret Lifetime of Youth throughout which he depicted conversations overheard whereas on public transport in Paris. Just a few of those had been tailor-made proper right into a 2009 movie often called Les Beaux Gosses (English title: The French Kissers), which obtained him a César Award the following 12 months for Most interesting New Director.

In claiming the Grand Prix at Angoulême, Sattouf succeeds 2022’s winner, Quebec’s Julie Doucet, and means he’ll in all probability be honoured with a major exhibition at subsequent 12 months’s event.