Isabel Greenberg
British graphic novelist and illustrator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 the United Kingdom;[1] Little, Brown and Company in the United States,[2] and Penguin Random House in Canada.[3] Greenberg also made a short film in 2018 called Janet, Who Fell From The Sea.[4]
Early life
Born in Camden, London, England, in 1988,[5] Greenberg studied illustration at the University of Brighton School of Art and graduated in 2011.[6]
In 2008, while still a student, Greenberg entered the Observer/Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize and was a runner-up.[7] 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.[6]
Career
In 2013, Greenberg was one of twenty graphic designers and illustrators to feature in the Memory Palace exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, sponsored by Sky Arts.[8] For the exhibition, an original piece of fiction by Hari Kunzru was transformed into a "walk-in graphic novel."[9]
In 2014, she was commissioned as part of the Pick Me Up Selects contemporary arts festival series at Somerset House.[10]
Greenberg has done work for The Guardian, The New York Times, the National Trust, Seven Stories Press, First Second Books, and Nobrow Press.[11] She has also worked with Chatham Dockyard, Tyntesfield House, and the English Folk Dance and Song Society.[12][13]
Graphic novels
Greenberg's first graphic novel, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (2013), is a series of interlinking stories set in Early Earth. Rachel Cooke, reviewing it in The Guardian, said it "already feels like a classic" and compared her to Tove Jansson.[14] It has been translated into German, Spanish, French, and Polish.[15]
In 2016, Greenberg released her second graphic novel, The One Hundred Nights of Hero.[16] A movie adaptation came out in 2025, directed by Julia Jackman and starring Emma Corrin, Maika Monroe, and Nicholas Galitzine.[17][18]
In her graphic novel Glass Town (2020), parts of Brontë family juvenilia are retold and intersect with the lives of four Brontë children — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne — as they explore the paracosm they created.[19][20] 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."[21]
Children's books
Greenberg has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Midnight Babies (Abrams Books, 2023) and Time to Go, Sid! (Abrams, 2026).[22][23] She illustrated the book A Hundred Billion Trillion Stars by Seth Fishman, which won the 2018 Mathical Book Prize.[24] Also in 2018, she illustrated Athena: The Story of a Goddess, by her younger sister Imogen Greenberg.[25]