Shaun Tan. Award Laureate 2011 1
Shaun Tan is an illustrator and author. He was bo
rn in 1974 in Western Australia and grew up in a suburb of Perth, a city he describes as the most remote place on earth, sandwiched between a vast desert and an even vaster ocean. As the son of a Chinese immigrant father and an Australian mother, he felt as somewhat of an outsider during his schooldays, but he was always the boy who could draw better than any of the others. In senior high school in Perth, he enrolled in a special art program for gifted students. Around the same time, he received his first illustration commission. In the mid-1990s he graduated in art, history and literature from the University of Western Australia. He now lives in Melbourne with his Finnish wife, Inari Kiuru. He has illustrated some 20 books, including a handful of titles where he was both author and illustrator. He also collaborates on animated film, musical and theatrical adaptations of his works, as well as producing fine art and murals. Shaun Tan breaks down the boundaries of storytelling, taking us to a place beyond the picture book, beyond the comic strip album, beyond conventions and literary hierarchies. Beyond the world as we know it, in fact. Readers encounter a narrative that occupies their entire consciousness. It is not just the formal structure of the books, with their lavish illustration, that takes the reader’s experience to a new level. The extreme diversity of the content, which has been described as a universe in itself, also transports us there. Shaun Tan’s visual worlds engage us and make us fellow players, as though we have stumbled into someone else’s dream. In Shaun Tan’s books, the future is assembled from the past. We encounter things we are familiar with and think we know, but also completely new and surprising occurrences. Retrofuturism might be one word to describe this fluid experience that transcends place. To encounter Shaun Tan’s books is to encounter a creative person with a passionate and unconditional love for illustration and narrative as well as his own vision. Shaun Tan sees every book as an experiment in visual and verbal storytelling, “… part of an ongoing exploration of this fascinating literary form.” Even if he is not explicitly narrating for children, he has at the back of his mind the notion of producing something a child can relate to: “It’s like a good guide for any artistic project – if a kid can relate to it … then you’re probably on the right track.” In his very first major picture book, The Viewer (1997), written by Gary Crew, Shaun Tan shows himself to be a true postmodernist with a mastery of visual creation. “For