Willem

Bernhard Willem Holtrop, known as Willem, is a Dutch satirical draftsman born in Ermelo in the Netherlands in 1941. He is in particular the first Dutch draftsman to have won the Angoulême prize.

He studied at the School of Fine Arts of Netherlands from 1962 to 1967. In 1966, he founded a satirical newspaper "God Dutch and Orange" which was soon censored. He then moved to France in 1968. He joined the newspaper L'Enragé during the manisfestations of May 1968. He also participated in the first issues of the weekly journal Hara Kiri ; ancestor of Charlie Hebdo. Where he wrote "Press review" and "Aesthetes". Not knowing French very good yet, the texts of his articles have a lot of grammar and syntactical mistakes, which the editorial team found amusing and let them this way and they became one his characteristics.

In parallel, he became editor in chief of the magazine Charlie Mensuel, and worked with Libération and Siné Mensuel. He also obtained the Grand Prize of the City of Angoulême in 2013.