Shaun Tan (born 15 January 1974) is an Australian artist, writer, and filmmaker. He is known for his graphic novelThe Arrival (2006), which won several awards, and for his 2010 animated short film adaptation of the 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated, The Lost Thing, for which he won an Academy Award. He has also written and illustrated many other books, including Tales From Outer Suburbia (2008) and The Red Tree (2001). Many of his works have won awards, including in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, and many have been adapted for screen and stage.
As a boy, Tan spent time illustrating poems and stories and drawing dinosaurs, robots and spaceships. At school he was known as a talented artist. At the age of eleven, he became a fan of The Twilight Zone television series as well as books that bore similar themes. Tan cites Ray Bradbury as a favourite at this time. These stories led to Tan writing his own short stories. Of his effort at writing as a youth, Tan tells, "I have a small pile of rejection letters as testament to this ambition!" At the age of sixteen, Tan's first illustration appeared in the Australian magazine Aurealis in 1990.
Tan almost studied to become a geneticist, and enjoyed chemistry, physics, history and English while in high school as well as art and claimed that he did not really know what he wanted to do. During his university studies, Tan decided to move from academic studies to working as an artist.
Tan continued his education at the University of Western Australia where he studied Fine Arts, English Literature and History. While this was of interest to him, there was little practical work involved. In 1995, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts.
Career
Work process
Initially, Tan worked in black and white because the final reproductions would be printed that way. Some black and white mediums he used include pens, inks, acrylics, charcoal, scraperboard, photocopies, and linocuts. Tan's current colour works include multiple different colours. He uses a graphite pencil to make sketches on ordinary copy paper. The sketches are then reproduced numerous times with different versions varying with parts added or removed. Sometimes scissors are used for this purpose. The cut and paste collage idea in these early stages is often extend to the finished production with many of his illustrations using such materials as "glass, metal, cuttings from other books and dead insects".
Tan describes himself as a slow worker who revises his work many times along the way. He is interested in loss and alienation, and believes that children in particular react well to issues of natural justice. He feels he is "like a translator" of ideas, and is happy and flattered to see his work adapted and interpreted in film and music (such as by the Australian Chamber Orchestra). Tan draws from a large source of inspiration and cites many influences on his work.
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."
Recognition and awards
In 2000, the Victorian Department of Language Literacy and Arts Education hosted Tan as illustrator/writer in residence for two weeks through a fellowship offered by the May Gibbs Children's Literature Trust. As part of the residency, Tan presented lectures and seminars at the University of Melbourne, met with individual students and staff, and visited two schools and conducted a research seminar.
The annual Shaun Tan Award for Young Artists is an art award sponsored by the City of Subiaco, which has been held since 2003. It is open to all Western Australian school children between 5 and 18 years. There are five award categories: three for primary school years and two for senior years, with prizes are donated by the council and other award sponsors presented to the top three entries in each category. A selection of the best entries are exhibited for a month in Subiaco Library, with the 2025 entries on display from 7 July to 3 August.
In 2010, Tan was awarded the Dromkeen Medal, presented by the State Library Victoria to those who have advanced children's literature in Australia.
In 2011, Tan won the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council, the biggest prize in children's literature, for his career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense".
Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, winner of the Children's Literature Award category and the South Australian Premier's Award for Tales from Outer Suburbia
The Arrival. Images from this book were projected during a performance by the Australian Chamber Orchestra of conductor Richard Tognetti's arrangement of Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 15[when?]
The Lost Thing has been adapted as an Oscar-winning animated short film.[when?]
The Lost Thing inspired an album by Sydney band Lo-Tel, complete with artwork from the book.[when?][citation needed]
The Lost Thing has also been adapted as a play by the Jigsaw Theatre Company, a youth theatre company in Canberra. This was the main event for the National Gallery of Australia's Children Festival (Canberra) and at the Chookahs! Kids Festival (Melbourne) in 2006.[citation needed]
The Lost Thing was the theme for the 2006 Chookahs! Kids Festival at The Arts Centre in Melbourne, with many different activities based on concepts from the book.[citation needed]
The Arrival was adapted for the stage by Red Leap Theatre.[when?]
An adaptation of the short story collection Tales of the Inner City is to be presented at a number of venues across Perth's CBD by the 2026 Perth Festival, supported by funding from the Creative Futures Fund. The "site-responsive theatrical adventure... part-performance, part-installation, and fully immersive" project is being produced by creatives from across the Asia Pacific region.
