GRAPHIC NOVELS –
The arrival: In this wordless graphic novel, a man leaves his homeland and sets off for a new country, where he must build a new life for himself and his family.
Shaun Tan (born 15 January 1974)[1] is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated short film adaptation of the 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. He also wrote and illustrated the books The Red Tree (2001) and The Arrival (2006).
Born in Fremantle, Tan grew up in Perth. In 2006, his wordless graphic novel The Arrival won the Book of the Year prize as part of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.[2] It also won the 2007 Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year award,[3] and the 2006 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards Premier’s Prize.[4]
Tan’s work has been described as an “Australian vernacular” that is “at once banal and uncanny, familiar and strange, local and universal, reassuring and scary, intimate and remote, guttersnipe and sprezzatura. No rhetoric, no straining for effect. Never other than itself.”[5] For his career contribution to “children’s and young adult literature in the broadest sense”, Tan won the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council, the biggest prize in children’s literature.[6]
Tan is a very popular artist in Australia.
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