Charis Loke is an illustrator based in Malaysia on the sunny and stormy equator. Her richly-layered covers and maps convey stories and cultures both real and imagined.

After discovering Shaun Tan’s The Arrival in a school library as a teen, Charis fell in love with visual storytelling. Since then she’s drawn street protests, market communities, election rallies, in the jungle, on a boat, by a glacier. She has worked on books by Fonda Lee, Hannah Whitten, Judy I. Lin, Vanessa Le, Kacen Callender, Andrea Stewart, Polly Ho-Yen, and Hanna Alkaf.

Drawing on her background in biochemistry, community arts, and sociology, she loves illustrating a wide range of subjects. She’s the co-editor of the comics anthologies SOUND (2020) and DELAY (2025) from Difference Engine, and has worked with close to a hundred Southeast Asian creators as a comics and illustrations editor for nonprofits and publishers.

Charis values thoughtful worldbuilding and queer characters in projects, being ace herself. She would love to work on stories with interwoven maps and text, Southeast Asian fantasy, music, or science as elements.