Sattouf won the Fauve d’Or (Golden Fawn) at the culmination of the 42nd Festival de la Bande Dessinée held in Angoulême, France, (the Angoulême International Comics Festival).
Annually in January, since 1974, Angoulệme, located in the Poitou-Charentes region in south west France, is host city for France’s biggest Bande Dessinée or comic strip festival. The event regularly draws up to 200,000 visitors, including thousands of professional cartoonists and comic strip artists.
Bande Dessinée, or BD as its known in France and Belgium, despite the advance of the Internet, remains a very popular medium. Many French bookshops feature hundreds of comics and comic books with subjects ranging from historical themes to sci-fi to erotica. Perhaps the most widely known example of BD internationally is Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin that were subsequently adapted into an animated television series and latterly a movie.
This year, with last month’s attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris and the killing of 11 people, including a number of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and journalists still fresh in people’s minds, it wasn’t surprising that Charlie Hebdo should take centre stage at Angoulệme.
The city itself was brimming with tributes to the satirical cartoonists slain during the January 7 attack in Paris while one of Angoulệme’s main squares was renamed “Place de Charlie,” in memory of those killed.
On Sunday, as the awards reached their climax, the organizers of the BD festival inaugurated a new award, the “Charlie Hebdo award for freedom of expression”. There could only be one winner — Charlie Hebdo magazine itself.
But it was 36-year-old Riad Sattouf, a French writer, cartoonist and film director that scooped Angoulệme’s top prize, the Fauve d’Or.
Born in Brittany in France’s far north-west in 1978, Sattouf spent his childhood in Algeria, Libya and Syria before returning to France to complete his education in Rennes and Paris.
His upbringing means Sattouf was uniquely placed to embark on the work that gained him this year’s Fauve d’Or, volume 1 of an autobiographical trilogy entitled “L’Arabe du futur – Une jeunesse au Moyen-orient (1978-1984)” — “The Arab of the future. A childhood in the Middle East”.
In the trilogy, Sattouf returns to his childhood spent partly in Libya and partly in Syria, describing life, through the eyes of a child, under the regimes of now-deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and Syria’s Assad, father of the current embattled Syrian president. The second part of Riad Sattouf’s L’Arabe du futur trilogy is scheduled for publication May 2015.
Sunday’s award was the second time Sattouf had emerged victorious at the Angoulệme Festival. In 2010, volume 3 of his Pascal Brutal series, Plus fort que les plus forts, (Stronger than the strongest), also won the top award.
Since 2004, Sattouf has also been a regular contributor to Charlie Hebdo, publishing a weekly feature in the satirical weekly entitled, “La vie secrète des jeunes” — The Secret Life of Youngsters — that recounts real life anecdotes.
