Riad Sattouf

Riad Sattouf (Arabic: رياض سطوف; born 5 May 1978) is a French cartoonist, comic artist, and film director. Sattouf is best known for his award-winning graphic memoir hexalogy 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. 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.