bio

Rutu Modan was born in Tel-Aviv in 1966. She graduated cum laude from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. After graduating, she began regularly writing and illustrating comic strips and stories for Israel’s leading daily newspapers, as well as co-editing the Israeli edition of MAD magazine. Modan is a co-founder of Actus Tragicus, an alternative comic artists collective and independent publishing house. In 1996, she collaborated with Israeli author Etgar Keret on her first graphic novel, Nobody Said it Was Going to Be Fun, an Israeli bestseller. Modan contributes to magazines and periodicals around the world, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Le Monde, and others. She has had two comics serialized in the New York Times; “Mixed Emotions” appeared as a comics blog and “The Murder of the Terminal Patient” ran on the pages of the New York Times Magazine. Exit Wounds was Modan’s first full-length English graphic novel and is the winner of the Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album–New. It was nominated for the Quill Award and the Ignatz Award, and lauded by Entertainment Weekly and numerous international publications and websites as the best comic of the year. Modan is the recipient of four Best Illustrated Children’s Book Awards from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Young Artist of the Year by the Israel Ministry of Culture, the International Board on Books for Young People in Basel, Switzerland Honor List for Children’s book Illustration, and is a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation since 2005. Rutu Modan has published three books with Drawn & Quarterly, Exit Wounds, Jamilti and Other Stories, and The Property, as well as the children’s book Maya Makes a Mess (Toon Books). She has taught comics and illustration at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, and she lives in Tel-Aviv with her family.