Japanese Art Festival Guests
SONIA LEONG
Sonia Leong is a professional comic artist and illustrator specialising in the Anime/Manga style.
A Winner in Tokyopop's UK Rising Stars of Manga competition (2005/06) and Winner in NEO Magazine's 2005 Manga Competition, Sonia is best known for her work with leading UK comic collaborative Sweatdrop. Her first graphic novel was Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet and her work has also featured in the films Popcorn (2007) and in the Channel 4's sitcom, The I.T. Crowd.
More on Sonia Leong here: http://fyredrake.net/me.html
AKEMI SOLLOWAY
Our keynote speaker will be Akemi Solloway who is a lecturer on both traditional and modern Japanese culture and the daughter of an old samurai family. Akemi has spoken on a wide range of subjects including tea ceremony, the role of women in Japan, Japanese business manner, the religion and lifestyle of Japan, Bushido and the history of manga.
Akemi also organises the Manga and Art Exhibition which supports and helps manga and anime artists in the UK and Japan. She also arranges cultural visits to Japan and works as a model for photographers and artists.
You can read more on our page here: Akemi Solloway.
More information on Akemi's work is also available via her website: www.solloway.org
Photo: Tony Thompson © 2006
PAUL GRAVETT
Paul Gravett is the author of Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics and Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life, co-author of Great British Comics and The Leather Nun & Other Incredibly Strange Comics, editor of The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, and director of the Comica Festival and co-publisher of Escape Books.
He is also a journalist, critic, lecturer and curator of exhibitions of British and international comic art.
You can read more via his website here: www.paulgravett.com
Photo: Peter Stanbury
HELEN McCARTHY
British writer Helen McCarthy likes to keep busy. In the past year she’s published a new book, 500 Essential Anime, and completed two more. Ilex Press will release her latest work, Manga In Stitches, in June 2009, and a further book in October 2009.
She’s also curated and presented a film season commemorating the 80th anniversary of Osamu Tezuka’s birth in November 2008, and will present another for the 20th anniversary of his death at the Barbican Cinema in London at the end of this month. Shortly before the Festival she’s attending an Asian culture workshop at the University of Hong Kong.
Helen curated the first anime programme at a UK convention in 1990, founded and edited the first anime magazine in the UK in 1991, and wrote the world’s first English-language anime book in 1993. Her third successful lecture series on anime and Japanese fantasy film continues until June at London’s Barbican Centre. She’ll also be attending several conventions in the UK and USA later in the year, and presenting talks and workshops on anime and manga in schools, hopefully in between writing Manga In Stitches 2.
In her copious free time, she’s still working on that elusive first novel.
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