Igort


Igort is an Italian comics artist, illustrator, script writer, and film director.

Biography

He began his career in Bologna at the end of the seventies, collaborating with numerous magazines: including Linus, Alter, Frigidaire, Métal Hurlant, L'Écho des savanes, Vanity, The Face. Since the nineties, he collaborates with the Japanese publishing houses Kodansha, Brutus and Hon Hon do.
In 1994 he exhibited his works at the Venice Biennale.
In 2000 he founded the Coconino Press publishing house.
In 2002 he publishes 5 is the perfect number, a Neapolitan noir, that he began drawing in Tokyo and completed after about 10 years of processing and rewriting. The book, labeled Coconino Press, came out simultaneously in 6 countries and won the Book of the Year Award at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It is Igort's most popular book to date.
Fats Waller will follow, an imaginative biography of one of the most popular Jazz musicians of the Thirties, in collaboration with the Argentine writer and screenwriter, Carlos Sampayo. Igort's work begins to spread further abroad. He moved to Paris and began the Baobab series, which tells the parallel lives of a Japanese boy and a young South American. Baobab series comes out simultaneously in Italy, France, Spain, Holland, Germany and the United States.
In 2010, after a long residence, between Ukraine, Russia and Siberia, Igort writes and draws Ukrainian Notebooks, published in the Strade Blu series of Mondadori.
In 2011 he published Russian Notebooks, drawn following a report by the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaja. The volume Pagine nomadi follows, its publication coincides with the large exhibition dedicated to graphic journalism hosted at the Milan Triennale.
In 2013 he starred in the documentary Igort, the secret landscape, by director Domenico Distilo which illustrates the research carried out for the trilogy on the Soviet Union, the birth of the graphic novel and its relationship with the story through images.
In the last half of 2014, Igort announces on his personal Facebook page the publication of his next work, Japanese notebooks, a memoir, comic essay, travel book and drawn reportage that tells the author's years spent in Japan. In December of the same year Nostalgia is published, a book which is a preview of a work to be published.
In November 2016, the novel My Generation comes out, which tells about the Punk and New Wave era. In the same month he released Gli assalti alle panetterie, a volume written by Haruki Murakami that Igort illustrated with watercolors.
On 21 February 2017 Igort announces on Facebook that he leaves Coconino Press because he is no longer able to do his job there serenely.
In 2019, Igort directed the live action adaptation of 5 is the Perfect Number, starring Toni Servillo and Valeria Golino.

Main works