Benoît Peeters

Biography

Benoît Peeters was born in Paris but spent his childhood in Brussels, where his father worked as one of the first European civil servants. At age 12, while attending Don Bosco High School, he met future comic book artist François Schuiten, with whom he created a newspaper called Go. He returned to France in 1973. After preparatory classes at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and a degree in philosophy from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, he studied at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales under the mentorship of Roland Barthes.

His 1980 semiotics master's thesis analyzed The Castafiore Emerald panel by panel. His first novel, Omnibus, a fictional biography of Claude Simon, appeared in 1976, followed in 1980 by La Bibliothèque de Villers, a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges and Agatha Christie. In 1977, he discovered gastronomy at the Troisgros brothers' restaurant in Roanne and later worked for a year as a private chef while living in Brussels; this experience was recounted in the graphic novel Comme un chef, illustrated by Aurélia Aurita.

Peeters has diversified his career as a novelist, biographer, screenwriter, comics critic and theorist, set designer, and publisher. In 2009, he published Écrire l'image, an autobiographical essay originally written as part of his habilitation thesis defended at the Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2007. He first met Hergé in 1977 in Brussels during an interview for the magazine Minuit. After publishing several short studies on Tintin, he was suggested by Hergé himself to write a monograph on the cartoonist, Le Monde d’Hergé, for which he interviewed Hergé three months before his death.

Filmography

Peeters wrote and directed the 35mm black and white short film Le Compte rendu, starring Eric Slèìchìm and Catherine Belkhodja, which was selected for the Berlin International Film Festival in 1987. In 1992, he co-wrote and co-directed the 15-minute color short Servaisgraphia with Pierre Drouot, presented at the Belgian pavilion of the Universal Exhibition of Seville 1992. He collaborated with François Schuiten and Wilbur Leguebe on the mockumentary Le Dossier B in 1995, released on DVD in 2007.

The feature film Le Dernier Plan, a 35mm color work co-written with Schuiten, Drouot, and Sandrine Willems and directed by Peeters, was produced in 1999 and shown at festivals including Locarno, Haifa, and Cairo. He also produced the long-form DVD Entretiens avec Alain Robbe-Grillet in 2001, the mockumentary L’Affaire Desombres in 2002, and co-wrote the documentary Jacques Derrida. Le courage de la pensée in 2014. Additionally, he contributed to the short film La Part de l’ombre by Olivier Smolders in 2014.

Awards and distinctions

In 1984, Peeters won the Bédésup Readers' Prize in the best graphic research category for Les Murailles de Samaris, created with François Schuiten. The following year, he received the Alfred Award for best album at the Angoulême Festival for La Fièvre d’Urbicande. In 1998, the Max and Moritz Awards gave him the Special Prize of the Jury for Le Guide des Cités. The Japan Media Arts Festival awarded him the Grand Prize in the Manga category in 2013 for Les Cités obscures. He earned an Eisner Award in 2022 for Best U.S. Edition of International Material for The Shadow of a Man. He was promoted to Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres on July 9, 2014.