Benoît Peeters was born in Paris on August 28 1956. After graduating in philosophy, he studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études under Roland Barthes, devoting a detailed study to Hergé's Les Bijoux de la Castafiore. He holds a habilitation to direct research, defended at Paris-I.
A Hergé specialist, theorist and critic with eclectic interests, he is the author of numerous essays on comics, screenplays and collaborative writing, as well as on Paul Valéry, Sándor Ferenczi, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jirô Taniguchi and Chris Ware. He published the first biography of Jacques Derrida, translated into ten languages.
His longstanding collaboration with cartoonist François Schuiten led to the creation of the Cités obscures cycle. Fifteen albums have been published to date , winning numerous awards and being translated worldwide. Passionate about storytelling in all its forms, Benoît Peeters has collaborated with other illustrators (such as Aurélia Aurita and Frédéric Boilet), a photographer (Marie-Françoise Plissart) and filmmaker Raoul Ruiz.
On October 7 2020, he gave the lecture " Génie de la bande dessinée " at the Collège de France.
