Sophie Yanow is a cartoonist, translator and educator. Her first graphic novel, War of Streets and Houses (Uncivilized Books), was nominated for TCAF's Doug Wright Spotlight Award and the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. Her comics journalism has appeared online in places like The Guardian and The Nib. Her translation of the Belgian graphic novel Pretending is Lying by Dominique Goblet was published by NYRC in February 2017. What is a Glacier?, a story about grief and climate change, was published by Retrofit in May 2017. She recently taught at the Center for Cartoon Studies MFA program in Vermont.
Website: http://www.sophieyanow.com
Portfolio: https://dribbble.com/syanow
Twitter: @sophieyanow
Instagram: sophieyanow
THE CONTRADICTIONS
(Drawn & Quarterly, September 2020)
2019 Eisner Award winner - Best Webcomic
Rights: Drawn & Quarterly
The Contradictions is a fictionalized memoir that examines how we define our politics and how we learn to question them. Sophie arrives in Paris hoping to cement her queer radical identity and befriends another exchange student, Zena, who’s committed to an anarchist lifestyle centered on veganism and shoplifting. During a disastrous hitchhiking trip to Amsterdam and Berlin, Sophie’s assumptions about the righteousness of their anarchist lifestyle are challenged time and again, leading her to question the value of a strict ideology in a world filled with contradictions.
WHAT IS A GLACIER?
(Retrofit Comics, 2016)
Sophie Yanow, acclaimed creator of WAR OF STREETS AND HOUSES, returns with another autobiographical tale of her trip to Iceland. Air travel in our environmentally fraught times is juxtaposed with her reflections on a relationship that ended a year prior.
WAR OF STREETS AND HOUSES
(Uncivilized Books, 2014)
The War of Streets & Houses is named after General Thomas Bugeaud's 19th century essay; the first manual for the preparation and conduct of urban warfare. The text greatly influenced Baron Haussmann’s famous re-development of Paris, and the planning of modern cities.
In 2012 the author participated in the massive Montreal student strikes. In the midst of protesting crowds and police kettles, the military origins of urban planning suddenly became an undeniable reality. Sophie Yanow’s most ambitious work to date deftly melds the history of urban planning, theories of control with personal experiences of political activism.