Sarah Laing

Sarah Laing (born 1973) is a New Zealand author, graphic novelist and graphic designer.

Laing was born in 1973 in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, United States and grew up in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

As a teenager she moved to Wellington and has also lived in Germany, New York, and Auckland.

She is currently based in Wellington.

Laing has a background in graphic design and worked as an illustrator.

In 2006, Laing won the 2006 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition.

In 2007 she published her first collection of short stories, Coming up Roses.

Laing was a writer in resident at the Michael King Writers Centre in 2008 and 2013.

Her first novel, Dead People’s Music, was published in 2009.

She is also the author of the short story ebook Inside a Pomegranate.

Following her time at the Sargeson Centre, she wrote and illustrated her second novel, The Fall of Light.

With Sonja Yelich she received the 2010 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship.

She completed a master's degree at Unitec in 2016.

She illustrated Macaroni Moon, a children's poetry book by Paula Green.

In 2016 she published the memoir Mansfield and Me: a Graphic Memoir (Victoria University Press), using the life and work of Katherine Mansfield to reflect on her own experiences; it was described as "part biography of Katherine Mansfield, part autobiography, and part account of her nagging insecurity about her own abilities."

The Times Literary Supplement said of the UK edition (Lightning Books): "Her watercolour-washed drawings delight us."

With Rae Joyce and Indira Neville, Laing was the co-editor of Three Words: An Anthology of Aotearoa/NZ Women's Comics, published in 2016.

Mansfield and Me: a Graphic Memoir was long listed in the Illustrated non-fiction category of the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

In 2019 she published Let Me Be Frank (Victoria University Press), an anthology of her comics dating back to 2010, in which she documented the breakdown of her marriage.

Again, a UK edition was published by Lightning Books.