Ken Krimstein Sells Rights To His Graphic Novel Biography Of Yoko Ono

Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Agent, beatles, Biography. Yoko Ono, graphic novel, Ken Krimstein

Ken Krimstein Sells Rights To His Graphic Novel Biography Of Yoko Ono

Ken Krimstein sells the world rights to his graphic novel biography of Yoko Ono to Thames & Hudson for publication in 2027

Article Summary

• Ken Krimstein has sold world rights to a new graphic biography of Yoko Ono to Thames & Hudson for 2027 release.
• The Yoko Ono book follows her life from wartime Tokyo to Fluxus, conceptual art, and her years with John Lennon.
• Thames & Hudson will publish the hardcover in the US and UK, with the deal brokered by agent Jennifer Lyons.
• Known for acclaimed graphic biographies, Krimstein brings his cartooning and literary style to Yoko Ono’s story.

New Yorker cartoonist and graphic biographer Ken Krimstein has sold world all-language rights to an as-yet-untitled graphic biography of Yoko Ono. “The book traces key moments of Ono’s life—from escaping fire-bombed Tokyo in a donkey cart and going to grammar school with the future Emperor of Japan, to her role as a founding member of Fluxus and pioneering conceptual artist performing at Carnegie Hall, to her time in London with John Lennon and the cultural blowback that followed.” Will Balliett at Thames & Hudson will publish a hardcover edition in the autumn of 2027 in the US and the UK. The deal was struck with Krimstein’s agent, Jennifer Lyons of the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency.

Ken Krimstein is best known for creating gag cartoons, but this is the next chapter in a more ambitious second act. The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, from 2018, won the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir and was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers from 2021 was named a best book of the year by NPR and The Washington Post. Einstein in Kafkaland followed in 2024. He teaches at DePaul University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been a New Yorker contributor since the early 2010s.

Yoko Ono is best known as the wife of John Lennon, with a reputation as the woman who broke up The Beatles, though Lennon was perfectly able to do that himself. Born in Tokyo in 1933, she was already a central figure in New York’s avant-garde and Fluxus circles. Cut Piece, Grapefruit, the Chambers Street loft concerts. before she met Lennon at the Indica Gallery in 1966. Recent years have seen a serious institutional reset, including Tate Modern’s Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, further museum tours, and prose biographies. Thames & Hudson is not a traditional comics house, which may be the point. The London-based publisher specialises in illustrated books on art, architecture, design, and visual culture. Balliett, longtime president and publisher of the U.S. operation, buying world rights signals that the house sees this as an art book that happens to be drawn, rather than a graphic novel in and of itself.

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