Rights sold to : US/UK (Uncivilized), Spain (La Cupula), Germany (Edition Moderne), Italy (Coconino), Brazil (Nemo), Turkey (Baobab)
« [Mana Neyestani] remolds the exhausting terrors of his life’s worst
months into grim comedy, and presents his friends and adversaries alike as mad-eyed, putty-bodied grotesques, crosshatched with a political caricaturist’s wicked eye for frailties. » New York Times
« Neyestani, who uses Kafka as a reference p oint, is plunged into a nightmare as bizarre as Gregor Samsa’s […] From the opening panel, Neyestani’s account of his personal ordeal masterfully conveys tension with a dense, cross-hatched style that powerfully evokes the claustrophobia of his imprisonment, and the lasting mental effects of his senseless persecution. » Publishers Weekly
"An edifying portrait of present-day Iran" Le Monde
Mana Neyestani’s autobiographical graphic novel is a Kafkaesque story. The Iranian cartoonist was jailed in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in 2006 over a cartoon published in the children’s section of a government newspaper. After three long months in jail, he managed to secure a temporary release and decided to flee his homeland. This was the start of a very long journey, taking him and his wife to Turkey, China and then Malaysia before finally moving to Paris in 2011, where they now live as political refugees. This graphic novel is his story.
17 × 24 cm, softcover
200 pages
black and white
Mana Neyestani was born in Tehran in 1973. He graduated as an architect but began his career in 1990 as a cartoonist and illustrator for many cultural, literary, economic and political magazines. With the rise of Iranian reformist newspapers in 1999 he became an editorial cartoonist.
Sidelined as a political cartoonist, Neyestani was forced to do children’s cartoons. One he did in 2006 led to his imprisonment and flight from the country. From 2007 to 2010 he lived in exile in Malaysia, doing cartoons for dissident Iranian websites worldwide. In the wake of the fraudulent election of 2009, his work has become an icon of defiance to the Iranian people. Neyestani has won numerous Iranian and international awards, most recently the 2010 CRNI Award for Courage. Since 2011, he lives in Paris, France with his wife. They are both refugees.
