Sarah Laing is a Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington-based novelist and cartoonist. Her graphic memoir, Mansfield and Me, was published to acclaim in Aotearoa New Zealand and the UK. She has maintained a long-running blog, Let Me Be Frank, which has an eponymous collection published by Victoria University Press (Wellington) and Lightning Books (UK). She drew daily comics during the first lockdown, and hopes to not have to repeat the experience.
She has designed and illustrated many book covers and books for publishers including Random House, Edinburgh University Press, Seraph Press and VUP, and has been a winner and finalist in the BPANZ book design awards, as well as the Best Design Awards. She won the 2006 Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition. Most recently she designed and illustrated Te Papa Press’ The Curioseum, an anthology that included twenty-two New Zealand authors including Margaret Mahy, Bill Manhire and Joy Cowley. She has recently been involved in designing literary journals for The Michael King Writers’ Centre and the Auckland Council’s migrant women and migrant youth creative writing programmes. She has held three literary residencies: the Buddle Findlay Sargeson residency and The Michael King Writers’ Centre and University of Auckland residency. She has presented at literary festivals both locally and internationally, in Beijing, Shanghai and most recently the 2014 Australia New Zealand This Way Up festival in London.
She maintained a popular comics blog in the 2010s, inspiring other women to draw comics, and gaining a significant social media profile. At the time she was involved in both the literary and comics community in a grassroots level, talking to community groups and to libraries, taking workshops, appearing on panels, and selling her comics at zine festivals, Armageddon and craft fairs.
Comics[]
- Dead People's Music (2009)
- [Unknown] (Darkest Day - Comics for Christchurch, 9th of April 2011)
- The Fall of Light (Vintage, 2013)[1]
- After the Floods (Faction Presents "High Water", 19th of August 2015)
- Mansfield and Me (2016)
- Three Words: an anthology of Aotearoa/New Zealand Women's Comics (Beatnik Publishing, 14th of March 2016)
- Utterances (Pantograph Punch, December 2016)[2][3]
- Let Me Be Frank (Victoria University Press & Lightning Books, 2019)
- The Last Concert Before Lockdown (Lockdown: Tales from Aotearoa, November 2020)
- Sylvia and the Birds: How the Bird Lady Saved Birds and How You Can, Too (2022)