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Isabel Poppy Greenberg (born 1988) is a British graphic novelist and illustrator.
Her first book, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, was published in 2013 by Jonathan Cape in London, Little Brown in the US, and Random House in Canada.[1] Greenberg has also made a short film in 2018 called Janet, Who Fell From The Sea.
Born in Camden in 1988,[2] Greenberg studied illustration at the Brighton School of Art and graduated in 2011.[3]
In 2008, while still a student, Greenberg entered the Observer/Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize, and was a runner-up.[4] She entered the competition again in 2011 and won it with "Love in a Very Cold Climate", a love story about a Nord, a North Pole-dweller, and Suit, a South Pole-dweller, who can never touch each other.[3]
In 2013, Greenberg was one of twenty leading graphic designers and illustrators to feature in the Memory Palace exhibition at the V & A, sponsored by Sky Arts.[5] An original piece of fiction by Hari Kunzru was transformed into a "walk-in graphic novel".[6]
In 2014, she was a select at Pick Me Up at Somerset House.[7]
Greenberg's work has been published in The Guardian, The Observer, and The New York Times, and by Nobrow Press.[8] She has worked with Chatham Dockyard, Tyntesfield House and the Museum of Marco Polo in Korčula, Croatia.[8]
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Greenberg's first graphic novel, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (2013), is a series of interlinking stories set in Early Earth, where her prize-winning short story was also set. Rachel Cooke, reviewing her book in The Guardian, said "her wonderful book already feels like a classic" and compared her to Tove Jansson.[9] It has been translated into German, Spanish, French[10] and Polish.
In 2016, Greenberg released her second graphic novel, The One Hundred Nights of Hero.[11] A movie adaptation was announced in 2024, directed by Julia Jackman and starring Emma Corrin, Maika Monroe and Nicholas Galitzine.[12]
In Glass Town (2020), parts of the Brontë juvenilia are retold and intersected with the lives of four Brontë children — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, as they explore the paracosm they created.[13][14] James Smart, for The Guardian, wrote: "Greenberg blurs fiction and memoir: characters walk between worlds and woo their creators. [...] This is a tale, bookended by funerals, about the collision between dreamlike places of possibility and constrained 19th-century lives".[15]
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Greenberg has also illustrated several children's books. The book A Hundred Billion Trillion Stars with Seth Fishman won the 2018 Mathical Book Prize.[16]
Also in 2018, she illustrated Athena: the story of a goddess, by her younger sister Imogen Greenberg.[17]
Greenberg currently lives in London, England.
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