Oh Brother - Graphic Novel

The current big project I'm working hard on is my very first graphic novel, Oh, Brother. The book is a memoir about growing up with my younger brother Robert, who is autistic and has an intellectual disability. It is a story of friendship, family and love between siblings, aimed at middle-grade readers. I'm writing it for 12-year-old me, who just wanted to know there were other siblings like me out there going through the same stuff.

Penguin Random House (PRH) Australia has acquired world rights to Oh, Brother in a joint deal between PRH Australia, Random House Graphic (US), PRH Children’s (UK) and Tundra Books (Canada), via Annabel Barker at Annabel Barker Agency and Daniel Lazar at Writers House. Oh, Brother will be published simultaneously in Australia, the US, the UK and Canada in 2025.

During the 6 years (!) I have been been working on Oh, Brother, I have been fortunate to receive support from several sources to develop it. I began writing this book with the support of the 2016 Colin Thiele Scholarship for Creative Writing, and received the 2017 Ian Wilson Memorial Fellowship through the May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust to continue working on it. In 2020 I received an Arts and Culture grant from Arts South Australia, which financially supported me to further develop the manuscript and prepare it for shopping to publishers.

You can read about my initial progress on Oh, Brother (along with stories about my experience with autism, what it's like making comics, the process of writing long-form work and other things like that) on the blog I kept in the first year of working on the project. A lot has changed since I first began working on the book (my writing and drawing level, how the world talks about autism and even who I am), and it’s been a really interesting, difficult and satisfying process (in mostly equal measures). The book has also evolved a lot over the 6 years (hopefully for the better!) and that is thanks to mentorship and support from fellow cartoonists Mandy Ord and Pat Grant, various workshopping sessions at the Comic Art Workshop, and now the wonderful editors at PRH. I really want Oh, Brother to be the best it can be, and can’t wait for you to read the final result.