Benjamin Flao

Born in 1975, Benjamin Flao was very early on influenced by the major figures of the Ninth Art: Franquin, Moebius, and Pratt. He left the traditional school system to enroll, at the age of fourteen, in the Saint-Luc School of Graphic Arts in Belgium. An avid traveler, he is a nomad of the comic art world, drawing inspiration from his travels. This trait earned him artistic recognition even before he began his career as a comic artist: in 2002, he received the Lonely Planet Award at the Clermont-Ferrand Travel Journal Festival for Carnet de Sibérie. From those years of travel and encounters, he developed a practice of sketching from life—using watercolor and inkwork—which would permeate his entire body of work. 

His career as a comic artist truly began in 2007 with La Ligne de fuite, created with writer Christophe Dabitch. This collaboration gave rise to the two-part series Mauvais Garçons. This first album earned him the 2008 Leclerc Prize for a debut graphic novel by an artist. Kililana Song marked a turning point in his career—his first self-written and illustrated story, inspired by his stays on the Lamu Archipelago off the coast of Kenya. The two-part series follows the escape of Naïm, an eleven-year-old boy fleeing a Koranic school, through an Africa torn between tradition and predatory modernity. The form perfectly complements the content: Flao begins with pencil sketches, which he enhances with inkwork (for the first time in his career), before adding his signature watercolor touches. Recognition was immediate: the 2012 Ouest-France–Quai des Bulles Award, followed—with his second album—by the Lucioles Award, the Marine-Océans Award, the 2013 RTL Grand Prix for Comics, and an official selection at Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2014. 

Since then, Flao has continued to explore this dual path of travel and storytelling, often collaborating with co-writers: Va’a, a Season in the Tuamotu Islands with Troub’s (2014), the adaptation of Jørn Riel’s Inuit novel Heq, and, with Fred Bernard, the comic art adaptation of The Hidden Life of Trees (2023). From one project to the next, a distinct signature emerges: that of a traveler-watercolorist who gives the page room to breathe, weaving together light, humanity, and ecological commitment.