(1.5 Mo)
Rights sold to : Germany (Hanser) / USA (Interlink) / Italia (Add Editore) / UK (Jonathan Cape)
« With the intimacy of a person who has lived the tragedy himself but with the restraint of a true artist, Hamid Sulaiman tells a powerful tale of Syria’s descent into cataclysm while reminding us of those still tending the seeds of the revolutionary spring. » Joe Sacco
"A heartbreaking and eye-opening primer to the quagmire of a generation." Kirkus Review
"One of the strength of the book is that Sulaiman is obviously very close to his characters and their fate and knows exactly what he is talking about." Der Tagesspiegel
"A beautiful story told in black and white, with subdued and raw violence." Le Point
A graphic novel in the middle of the Syrian revolution.
Freedom Hospital is the first graphic novel by Hamid Sulaiman, a Syrian visual artist who fled his country and found shelter in France after going underground for a year. He tells us about the beginnings of war in Syria, from the first peace demonstrations in 2012 to the rise of Daesh. This fiction based on true facts focuses on the Freedom Hospital, an underground hospital founded by a peace activist. In this hospital, patients and nursing staff live side by side, reflecting the multifaceted Syrian society : a Kurd, an Alawi, a Franco-Syrian journalist, members of the Free Syrian Army and a radical Islamist, whose relation to each other will evolve as events unfold.
Political commitment, betrayal, alliance reversal and war horror are at the heart of the story of this group of individuals : they are History’s puppets caught in the turmoil of events they have no control over. With this graphic novel staged in an expressionist
way, using strong visual contrasts, Hamid Sulaiman shouts his rage against war and calls for love and peace.
Winner of the English Pen Award 2017
16 X 22 cm, softcover with flaps
288 pages
b&w
Hamid Sulaiman was born in Damascus in 1986. He graduated as an architect but chose to dedicate himself to painting and illustration. He was forced to flee from his country in 2011 and he was granted status as a political refugee in France and settled in Paris. His work was shown in London, Beirut, Cairo, Vienna, Berlin... Some of his paintings got into the British Museum collection and he participated to an exhibition in the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. In 2014, he received the Al-Mawred Al-Thafaqi Prize for emerging artists and assigned the earned grant to the making of his graphic novel, Freedom Hospital. Hamid Sulaiman is currently living in Germany and working on his next graphic novel, 82.