Patrick Chappatte was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1967, of a Lebanese mother and a Swiss father. His family subsequently moved to Singapore, then to Switzerland. In 1995 Chappatte moved to New York, where he worked as an illustrator for the New York Times and as a cartoonist for Newsweek.
Chappatte left the Unites States in 1998, and now lives in Geneva, Switzerland. He draws for the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times global website, and also cartoons in French for Le Temps in Geneva, and in German for the Sunday edition of the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, in Zurich.
In 2009, Chappatte travelled to Lebanon on behalf of the Red Cross to investigate the continuing problems caused by cluster bombs. He produced a comic-book report entitled Death in the Fields, which first appeared as an illustrated story in Le Temps, and which in 2011 was turned into an eleven-minute animated documentary.
‘I don’t think a cartoon has ever made anybody change their mind’, Chappette argues, ‘but they can concentrate an idea.’