Arja Kajermo

Arja Kajermo was born in Finland but grew up in Sweden. She arrived fully formed in Ireland in the 1970s.

She started drawing cartoon strips for In Dublin magazine when it was still “avant garde”. These cartoons came out in book form as The Dirty Dublin Strip Cartoons.

She illustrated the yearly Women’s Diary published by the feminist Attic Press, and she has contributed to many other Irish publications: The Irish Press, The Sunday Tribune (which ran her strip Dublin Four for a while), Image magazine, The Irish Times and others.

Now that her work in Ireland is done, she works for Sweden’s biggest daily paper Dagens Nyheter where she has a strip called Tuula every Sunday. She has three books of her cartoons published in Sweden. The first book, En pillig sol i Särholmen, was nominated for the prestigious Swedish cartoon book prize Unghunden; she didn’t win.

She has also illustrated various educational books in Sweden and the U.K

En pillig sol i Särholmen : the first volume of the Tuula cartoon strip.