Meet the author

Luke Pearson.

Writer & illustrator · United Kingdom · b. 1987

Luke Pearson: British creator of the Hilda graphic-novel series — Scandinavian-folklore middle-grade comics with a Netflix adaptation, a defining 8–12 graphic-novel voice.

Luke Pearson is a British cartoonist born in 1987, best known as the creator of the Hilda graphic-novel series, eight middle-grade volumes following a blue-haired girl exploring a Scandinavian-folklore-inflected world of trolls, giants, ghosts and woodland spirits. The Hilda books, beginning with Hildafolk (2010), have spawned a major Netflix animated adaptation, prose-novel adaptations (Stephen Davies), and an entire visual language imitated across UK and US middle-grade publishing. Pearson's style is clean, painterly and slightly melancholy, with a folkloric register that owes more to Tove Jansson and Studio Ghibli than to mainstream Western comics. He has also worked as a storyboard artist on Adventure Time. A defining contemporary middle-grade graphic-novel author for ages 8–12.