Career, Works & Awards

Career Highs and Lows
Sarah began her career in her mid-thirties when she officially started drawing comics instead of sketching for leisure. She is a self-thought cartoonist however, she discovered her passion for comics at the age of 36. Her first book called ‘Tangles: Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me’ has had a tremendous amount of success worldwide. Apart from writing and art, she works for a non-profit that is related to social justice movements. Previously, she has taught workshops and has appeared at several conferences and festivals. She has also designed a university course on comics for University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Creative Writing department. In 2014 and 2015, she taught Writing for Graphic Forms course at UBC and currently, teaches part-time. She is also presently in the process of developing a feature length animation film on her award-winning graphic memoir and publishing her second book titled Agnes, Murderess.

Works
Sarah Leavitt, a Vancouver based writer and cartoonist published her first book ‘Tangles: Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me’ in parts of Canada through Freehand Books in 2010. Later, it was published in the US by Skyhorse in May 2012, in France and Quebec in 2014, and in Korea in September 2015. Sarah has appreciated the Korean translation of Tangles and, believes that it is a way to honour her story and art. Besides this, her prose and comics have appeared in anthologies, magazines, and newspapers in countries like Canada, US and the UK. In 2014, Sarah illustrated one of the stanzas in a book titled ‘To This Day’ by Shane Koyzan published by Annick Press. In 2015, she announced her upcoming second book called Agnes, Murderess scheduled to be published by Freehand books once again in September 2018. This is a novel set in the nineteenth-century in British Columbia where readers can expect to see more detailed drawings. Simultaneously, she is developing a ‘Tangles’ based online interactive project for the National Film Board of Canada. She is also producing a feature length animation film in collaboration with Giant Art Media. The trailer has already been released.

Awards
Tangles has been awarded a Kirkus Starred Review prior to being published in the US in 2012. It was the first graphic memoir to be a finalist for 2010 Writers’ Trust of Canada Non-Fiction Prize. It was also mentioned in the Globe and Mail’s top 100 books and, Maisonneuve Magazine’s top 10. The memoir won the CBC Bookie award for best comic and graphic novel.