Singapore Writers Festival: Retelling war stories in comic form, querying queer writing after repeal

SINGAPORE – Speaking through a translator, French-Jewish novelist Julia Billet told an audience comprising mostly young people that World War II is not as distant as it seems.

She said the rhetoric used in Europe today to describe immigrants echoes that used in the 1940s to denigrate the Jewish population. Her comic book, La Guerre de Catherine (Catherine’s War), is inspired by her mother who, as a girl, had to change her name and move four times as the war unfolded around her.