SOFIA FALKENHEM (Sweden) & MAKI SATO (Japan)

Sofia Falkenhem (Sweden)

Growing up playing in the Swedish woods, Sofia developed a fondness for drawing trees and animals. She now resides in Malmö in southern Sweden, where she shares a studio space with ten other cartoonists.
Sofia’s work includes comics, traditional printmaking and illustrations for children’s books, and when she’s not drawing she teaches art to high school-students. Her comics are mostly self-published, but can also be found in anthologies such as the Best New Manga-books. Her love for pictures is strong, and her love for combining them into stories is even stronger.

More on www.sofiafalkenhem.com and www.sofiafalkenhem.blogspot.com

Maki Sato (Japan)

Maki Sato, a Japanese comic artist, was born in 1981 in Tokyo.  She studied Japanese art in high school, and went on to study in the Department of Comic Art of Kyoto Seika University.  While studying, she drew and self-published many short comics.  In 2003, she won the Grand Prix of the Kuroshio Comic Competition, sponsored by the Kochi Newspaper Publishing Company.  In the same year, she held a small exhibition of her comic works in a cafe in Paris.  This experience inspired her to want to publish her works abroad.  Since 2007, she has worked as a professional cartoonist based in Tokyo and published three trade paperback comic books from two different publishing companies.  Her work has been translated into English and Korean.

More on www.geocities.jp/vostok1961/vtop.html