After writing Intisar’s Car, which won the France Info Award of 2013 for the best comic on current events and reporting, Pedro Riera has brought back his heroine by writing about her years of exile in Jordan. Intisar talks about the terrible situation Yemen is going through, with her peculiar sense of humor and her profound though sometimes immature viewpoint, and her occasional anger, on her path towards becoming a free and independent woman.  The ups and downs in Intisar’s life are the result of listening to the testimonials of dozens of women whom Pedro Riera met on his trips to Yemen and Jordan in 2011 and 2016. His talent as a storyteller and screenwriter fill the character on paper with true humanity, expressing the everyday struggle and hopes of Yemeni women, who the civil war and exile paradoxically liberate from men’s control to a certain extent.

Presentation information sheet

Pedro Riera is a comic writer and screenwriter. His first two novels, Heridas de guerra (War Wounds) and Un alto en el camino de los mirlos (A Stop on the Blackbirds’ Path), deal with the post-war period in Bosnia, a country where he lived from 1997 to 1999. As a children’s and young adult writer, he has had a dozen books published, for which he has received five different awards. As a writer of comics, he has published El coche de Intisar (Intisar’s Car), with drawings by Nacho Casanova. It is a graphic novel about the situation of women in Yemen, a country where he lived for one year from 2009 to 2010. This book’s huge success was what led him to write a sequel: Intisar en el exilio (Intisar in Exile).