Interview by Shannon Barnes
Tell us about your latest book or a project you are working on.
I just finished a new picture book called Midnight Manor. It’s my first children’s book that’s not a comic, and it’s about a bunch of kids and ghosts and goblins who live in a haunted house where they sleep all day and have fun all night. It comes out in the fall of 2026, and I can’t wait. I’m also working on a graphic novel about some worms having a psychedelic odyssey adventure, but I don’t know much about that one because it doesn’t exist yet. I think they befriend a skeleton.
Tell us about your writing process.
I sort of start writing and talk to my friends a lot about how writing is hard and then I switch to drawing and then I end up with all of these drawings but no story so I have to go back to writing and then I lie down on the floor moaning a lot and then have several inspiring conversations with my dreamy editor Serah-Marie McMahon and then somehow I finish the book. I recommend no parts of my process except for working with Serah-Marie, and maybe lying on the floor.
How did you first get published?
My aforementioned dreamy editor saw me doing my OCAD U Illustration program homework and asked me if I wanted to make a kids’ book, and I said no! But I was wrong and fell in love pretty immediately with making them. I took a short adult comic I had made years before about a sheep dressed as a wolf and reimagined it for kids, and it was suddenly way different and newly fascinating to me. We pitched The Wolf Suit to Annick Press, and I’ve been working with them ever since.
What do you like about writing for young people?
Kids have just as much imagination and humour as adults, but aren’t so limited by cynicism and the boring parts of rationality. I think most of drawing and making stories for me is about the rediscovery of that kind of ungoverned thinking.
Tell us about writers who inspire you.
I grew up reading Roald Dahl, Jules Feiffer, and Edward Gorey, and I think they all probably show up in my work as influences. I love R.L. Stine, even though I think the influence is probably less obvious there. I switched to adult books fairly early and got obsessed with Shirley Jackson and Helen Oyeyemi and Mervyn Peake. I think my favourite picture book when I was little was In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. I’ll be doing the Sendak Fellowship this summer and I can’t wait to snoop through Maurice’s archives.
Learn more about Sid Sharp at sidsharp.com, and follow them on Instagram @sad_sharp.