Judith Vanistendael: 'This first love has defined my storytelling'

In the first of our Autumn podcasts, Daisy Johnson told us how she was living on the edge when she was writing her collection The Hotel, and read from her short story Conference. Over the course of this season we'll be ranging all round the world to hear from Esther Karin Mngodo, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb, but this time Judith Vanistendael explains why The Small Story is very close to home.

This graphic short started when she began thinking about her own family, and how the funny story her grandfather Jef told about his bike trip to France in 1940 was actually "part of big historical events".

"I never thought of my grandparents in a political way," Vanistendael says. "But they were involved, without even wanting to be."

The writer explains how she didn't know much about the history that lies under her story, with millions of people on the move as the Germans advanced and hundreds of thousands of young Belgian men sent to the south of France to train. And beyond these bare facts, she admits it's difficult to tell whether the story Jef told was really true: "My grandfather was a good storyteller."

The second world war still looms large in Belgium, Vanistendael continues, because it was so tough.

"We're a small country, we're quite new," she explains. "We were made in the 1830s by everybody around us. We do not trust power, or big stories."

One of the large stories that runs through Vanistendael's work is the experience of refugees. Her first graphic novel, Dance by the Light of the Moon, is an autobiographical story about her first relationship.

"I was in love with a Togolese, Muslim refugee," she says, "and it seems as if this first love has defined my storytelling."

Human beings have always been restless, she continues, but the arbitrary boundaries of the nation state have changed everything. "Being on the move in this world, the way it is organised, is very difficult."

Over recent years, Vanistendael has started using digital techniques alongside more traditional ways of making images and she doesn't rule out the possibility that comic artists will be replaced by AI. But she's confident that artists will always find ways to use their skills.

"I don't know the future," she says, "but I'm not that afraid."

Next time we'll be looking ahead with Scott Jacobs.

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