Jean Plantureux, Plantu, was born in Paris in 1951. He wanted to study theatre and comics, but his parents registered him for medicine. Two years later, in 1971, he travelled to Brussels to attend drawing classes at the Saint-Luc school. On his return to Paris he approached many newspapers with his drawings and was eventually taken on by Le Monde. He also worked for the Phospore newspaper until 1986. In 1988 Plantu obtained the prestigious Mumm Prize and in 1989 the Prix de l’humour noir. Since 1991, he has been working for the weekly journal L’Express.
In 2006, with the help of the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he created Cartooning for Peace, and is now the President of the association. In 2010 Plantu won first prize in the 10th International Competition organised by the Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom and in February 2011 he won second prize in the thirteenth Porto Cartoon World Festival. He has also won the International Gat Perich Award. The French Post Office has issued a stamp drawn by Plantu as a tribute to Médecins Sans Frontières and UNESCO has published drawings by Plantu in various languages in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In 2002 he celebrated the fact that he had published 15,000 drawings and had been contributing to Le Monde for thirty years. His work has appeared in numerous exhibitions. In October 2012 Le Monde published a special edition illustrated by Plantu to mark the fortieth anniversary of his joining the paper with a total of 19,000 drawings published.
