Bumping the lamp: An interview with graphic novelist Hannah Berry

Hannah Berry is a cartoonist, artist and writer who has created three graphic novels – Britten and Brülightly (Berry: 2008), Adamtine (Berry: 2012) and Livestock (Berry: 2017) – all published by Jonathan Cape. She has also contributed short works to a number of anthologies, illustrating scripts by other writers or writing scripts for other artists. These include Above the Dreamless Dead: World War I in Poetry and Comics (Duffy et al., 2014), Hoax: Psychosis Blues (Thornton et al., 2014) and IDP: 2043 (Mina et al., 2014). Her work is generally genre-based, except for a weekly cartoon strip created for the British current affairs magazine The New Statesman. The following interview is an extract from two conversations with Berry, recorded a year apart. These took place in front of audiences at Graphic Gothic – The Seventh International Conference of Graphic Novels and Comics at Manchester Metropolitan University (July 2016) and Cartoon County (July 2017), a monthly meeting for cartoonists to discuss their work in front of their peers at various venues in Brighton and Hove.