His credits include the graphic novels Monet: Itinerant of Light and The Photographer of Mauthausen. Salva Rubio is a Spanish author and historian. In 2016, she was awarded Spain’s Order of Civil Merit for her promotion of Spanish culture in Australia. She presents sessions at writers’ festivals, gives talks on Spain-related and translation topics, and organises visits to Australia by Spanish-speaking writers. Her translations of short stories, essays and the occasional poem have been published in journals and anthologies. Her book-length translations include the bestselling The Librarian of Auschwitz (Antonio Iturbe, 2017), Australian Connection (multiple authors, 2019), and two futuristic novels by Rosa Montero, Tears in Rain (2012), and Weight of the Heart. Lilit Žekulin Thwaites is an award-winning Melbourne-based literary translator (Spanish>English), and an honorary research fellow in contemporary Spanish literature at La Trobe University. His other books include The Prince of the Skies.

He interviewed Dita Kraus, the real-life librarian of Auschwitz, for The Librarian of Auschwitz. (Jan.Antonio Iturbe is a novelist and journalist. It’s a passionate rendering of a fiery life that will leave readers wishing it did not end so quickly. The slim page count also leaves the story feeling truncated, though it mirrors the tragic early death of Reinhardt. But with stunning determination and cocksure arrogance (“I am the best in the world, after all”), he fought his way back into the music that gave his life meaning. Just as his career was taking off, a fire left Reinhardt with third-degree burns and a nearly amputated left hand. Soon, bands vied for the services of the rakishly arrogant, lightning-fingered teenager who blew his earnings at the card table and never learned to read.

He began practicing until his fingers bled, and then one night heard jazz through the door of a nightclub that refused him entry and was transported. Growing up fatherless in a Roma community outside Paris called The Zone in the 1920s, the scrappy, teenage Reinhardt was tilting into delinquency when the gift of a banjo “charged with all the magic of American music” sent his life rocketing on a new trajectory. Efa paints the early years of Reinhardt’s life in lushly romantic, historically detailed panels with characters given comically exaggerated facial renderings that recall the Pixar treatment. The brilliant jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt (1910–1953) is given a high-drama origin story in this graphic biography scripted by Rubio and drawn by Efa, who collaborated previously on Monet: Itinerant of Light.

Monet by Salva Rubio