Eight Australian comic artists read their stories against a colourful backdrop of visual projections.
An afternoon of live graphic storytelling about living in this weird, wild world we’re all in together.
Through a compelling mix of genres and diverse voices, audiences will hear stories about being trapped in the city, tangled in relationships, and taking trips to connect with ancestors long gone. Through rich storytelling and imagery, listen as readers seek meaning in unexpected places, and find laughter in the saddest moments.
Award-winning comic makers Safdar Ahmed, Sarah Firth, Mirranda Burton, Eleri Harris, and Joshua Santospirito will present stories along with Evie Hilliar, Fionn McCabe, and political cartoonist Jess Harwood.
This event contains mature themes and is intended for an adult audience.
Safdar Ahmed
Safdar Ahmed is a Sydney-based artist, musician and educator. He is a founding member of the community art organisation Refugee Art Project, and member of eleven, a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers. Safdar has won numerous awards for his work, including a Walkley for his documentary web-comic Villawood: Notes from an immigration detention centre (2015). His debut graphic novel, Still Alive (2021) won numerous awards, including two NSW Premier Literary awards in 2022.
Sarah Firth
Sarah Firth is an Eisner Award winning comic artist, writer, speaker and internationally renowned graphic recorder. Her work has been published by ABRAMS Books, ABC Arts, Frankie Magazine, Penguin Random House, Picador, Allen & Unwin, The Nib, Black Inc, and Routledge. Her debut graphic novel, Eventually Everything Connects (2023), has been highly accliamed and shortlisted for numerous awards, including a Prime Minister’s Literary Award for best non-fiction and Alia Graphic Notable Australian Graphic Novels of 2023. She lives and works on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung country.
Mirranda Burton
Mirranda Burton is a printmaker, animator, educator, and graphic storyteller based in Melbourne. Her first graphic novel Hidden (2011) was published by Black Pepper and released in French as Cachés by La Boîte à Bulles. Her latest graphic novel, Underground (2021), was released in 2021 by Allen & Unwin, and has gone on to win numerous accolades including as a Notable Book at the 2022 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year awards and Eve Pownall Award.
Eleri Harris
Eleri Harris is a cartoonist, journalist, and comics editor and Features Editor at The Nib until its closure. Her Nib comic serial Reported Missing, workshopped at CAW 2015, was shortlisted for the 2018 Center for Cartoon Studies & Slate Book Review Cartoonist Studio Prize and won Gold at the 2018 Ledger Awards in Australia. Eleri’s work as a comics editor has garnered two Ignatz awards and a Harvey award.
Joshua Santospirito
Joshua Santospirito lives in nipaluna, lutruwita with his partner, his naughty chooks and two exceptionally well-behaved dogs. He is a musician and multimedia artist but is most well known as being a graphic novelist, having published the award winning The Long Weekend in Alice Springs (2013) and Swallows Part One (2015). His latest graphic novel, The Islands Where We Left Our Ancestors (2024) was published by Scribe this past July.
Jess Harwood
Jess Harwood is a cartoonist, environmental campaigner, illustrator and facilitator with more than ten years’ experience in coal and biodiversity campaigns. Jess lives on Gadigal land in Sydney and is co-founder of South Asians for Climate Justice. Her art and illustrations have been featured on the BBC and ABC, and in many environmental and social justice campaigns.
Evie Hilliar
Evie Hilliar is a writer, illustrator, designer, teacher and animator based on Gadigal land. A lover of storytelling and noticer of the weird and wonderful, her comics have appeared in numerous publications and, with more than 98 thousand followers on Instagram, Evie is one of the most followed comic artists in Australia. Her new animated series, Deadbeat Ends Meet, is currently in production with LateNite Films.
Fionn McCabe
Fionn McCabe is a comics maker, educator, and one of the producers of Read To Me and works and lives on Gadigal/Wangal land. He teaches one of the few tertiary comics classes in NSW at the University of Technology Sydney, and has run comics workshops for City of Sydney, the Sydney Opera House, and many other organisations.
His work has been exhibited in the United States in places like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City, as well as in Jogjakarta, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Sydney, and other major cities around the world. His climate change comic Leathery Little Saints (2021) was shortlisted by the Comic Arts Awards of Australia, and has recently been translated into French.
Gabriel Clark
Gabriel Clark is the co-founder and co-producer of Read To Me and is a senior lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney, where he established and delivered some of the country’s first tertiary-level graphic storytelling curricula.
His research and creative practice is in multimodal graphic storytelling, his projects include the Graphic Storytellers at Work report for Creative Australia, and FOLIO Stories of Australian Comics an ARC-funded oral history project. Other projects include the Graphic festival at the Sydney Opera House, the award-winning Radio With Pictures, and several online graphic storytelling projects for ABC Radio and TV.
Read To Me
Read To Me is a NSW based, artist-run project that celebrates the art of Australian graphic storytellers by presenting their work to live audiences.
Find out more about Read To Me.
Comic Art Workshop
Comic Art Workshop is a volunteer-run organisation dedicated to supporting comic artists working on ambitious projects.
