Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett are a wife-and-husband team and co-creators of 'Gender Swapped Fairy Tales' (Faber and Faber, 2020). Karrie is a comic creator and visual storyteller and Jonathan Plackett is a digital inventor.
The Story Behind the Story
The idea originated when Jonathan was a little boy his dad would read him and his sister bedtime stories. But, like so many parents, he would secretly swap the genders of the characters. This made the stories far more compelling for him to read while providing his two children with exciting, fresh characters that didn’t conform to old gender stereotypes. Now Karrie and Jonathan are parents who have a child of their own and want to read her stories with varied gender roles.
Karrie's Biography
Karrie Fransman is a comic artist and writer and visual storyteller. Her comics have been published in The Guardian, The Times, Time Out, The Telegraph, the BBC, The New Statesman and by The Arts Council. She published two graphic novels with Penguin Random House; ‘The House That Groaned’ (2012), and the award winning ‘Death of the Artist’ (2015). Her latest illustrated book, ‘Gender Swapped Fairy Tales’, was co-created with Jonathan Plackett and will be published by Faber & Faber in November 2020. She developed an award winning comic, ‘Over, Under, Sideways, Down’ about an Iranian teenage refugee, for The British Red Cross, created an installation for the British Council and Southbank Centre and was commissioned to make a ‘Selves Portrait’ for an exhibition with Manchester Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. She has spoken and run workshops at The Guardian Masterclasses, Tate Modern, TEDx, Central Saint Martins, Oxford University, The Hay Festival, The Big Draw, House of Illustration and The British Library, and presented her work worldwide from Russia to Bangladesh, Lebanon and Mexico. You can find more of her work at
karriefransman.com. Or get in touch on Instagram
@KarrieFransman and Twitter/X
@KarrieFransmanJonathan's Biography
Jonathan Plackett is Creative Technologist / Thinker / Maker / Coder / AI Whisperer / Game Designer / Author. He specialises in creating playful and shareable interactive experiences including apps, websites, filters, music videos, games and books with audiences measured in the hundreds of millions. His work has been featured in worldwide press including The Wall Street Journal, Der Spiegel, The Times, The Telegraph and the BBC. You can see more of his creations at
plackett.co.uk and get in touch via Twitter/X
@jonplackett Contact
Feel free to reach out to the creators on social media, or via their agent
Sophie Lambert at C+W Agency.