Meet the author

Guojing.

Writer & illustrator · China

Guojing: a Chinese author-illustrator of near-wordless graphic novels whose Oasis tells a desert survival story of pure visual tenderness, about family, longing and being cared for, for readers 8 and up.

Guojing is a Chinese author-illustrator, originally from Shanxi Province and trained at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, who works in the near-wordless graphic-novel form. In our corpus she is represented by Oasis, a luminous, almost silent story of a girl and her little brother surviving alone in a parched desert on the edge of a gleaming city while their mother works to earn them a place inside, until they wake a dormant robot who becomes an unlikely second mother. Inspired by the real phenomenon of children left behind while parents seek work in the city, it balances desolate beauty with deep tenderness. Her pictures carry the whole emotional weight, returning again and again to family, loneliness, resilience and what it means to be cared for.