Vera Brosgol
Moscow
Vera Brosgol is a graphic novelist and picture-book author-illustrator based in Portland.
- Two Eisners: Anya's Ghost and Plain Jane
- Caldecott Honor for Leave Me Alone!
- Ten years of Laika storyboards: Coraline, Kubo
- Head of Story on an Oscar-winning Pinocchio
- A Russian summer camp became Be Prepared
“A lot of it is based on my feelings about my Russian heritage as a young person.”
Born in Moscow in 1984, she came to the US with her family at five; her mother read her Russian fairy tales, and Ivan Bilibin shaped her drawing. She studied classical animation at Sheridan College, and Laika brought her to Portland on the strength of a student film she had posted online. She spent ten years storyboarding Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings, and was Head of Story on the Academy Award-winning Pinocchio.
Her first graphic novel, Anya's Ghost (2011), draws on her feelings about her Russian heritage as a teenager and won Eisner and Harvey awards; her picture book Leave Me Alone! was a Caldecott Honor. Be Prepared (2018) is a near-memoir of a summer at a Russian Orthodox scout camp in Connecticut.
Plain Jane and the Mermaid won her a second Eisner in 2025, the year her first prose novel, Return to Sender, came out.
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