The meeting with a creative person

Recipients of The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award 2011
Shaun Tan is a virtuoso visual storyteller, a guide to the book's pictures of new opportunities. His imagery is its own universe where nothing is clear and everything is possible. The memory of childhood and adolescence are fixed reference points, but the picture storytelling is universal and affects everyone regardless of age.

Behind a wealth of meticulously detailed images, the critique of civilization and history of symbolic design is a real warmth. Man is always present, and Shaun Tan portrays both our candidates our alienation. He combines brilliant storytelling magic with deep humanism.

The jury

"... I often think of words and images to opposite poles of a battery, where the gap between telling and showing a tension. To complete the circuit, the reader must use their imagination ... "

Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan's picture storyteller and writer. He was born in 1974 in Western Australia and grew up in a suburb of Perth, a city which he himself describes as the world's most remote location, between a vast desert and an even more extensive ocean.

As the son of an immigrant Chinese father and an Australian mother, he experienced himself as being different in their schooling, but was always seen as the boy who could draw better than anyone else. His high school in Perth, he spent in an art program for especially talented students. While he got his first illustration assignment. In the mid-1990s, he took a degree in art, history and literature at the University of Western Australia. He now lives in Melbourne with his Finnish wife, Inari Kiuru.

His literary works list includes some twenty titles, of which a handful are entirely separate works. He is also working on adaptations of his works to the animated film, music and theater - as well as with free art and mural painting.

Shaun Tan blow narrative boundaries, takes us to a place beyond the picture book, beyond the comic book, beyond the conventions and literary hierarchies. Yes, beyond the world as we know it. The reader will encounter a narrative that takes the whole consciousness of time. It is not just books formal design with its sumptuous visual narrative, which moves the reader's experience to a new level. It also implements it by content tremendous diversity that has been described as one's own cosmos. The reader is engaged by Shaun Tan's visual worlds and become Medak, as if you've stumbled into someone else's dream.

In Shaun Tan's books, the future is made by assembling the past. The reader meets such the know and think they know but also completely new and amazing things. Retro Futurism could be a word for this liquid and place overrun experience.

The meeting with Shaun Tan's books are meeting with a creative person who has a passionate and unconditional love both the picture and story to their own vision. Shaun Tan see each book as an experiment in visual and verbal storytelling, "as an ongoing study of this fascinating literary form". Although he did not explicitly tell the child he has the idea in mind to achieve something that a child can relate to: "It is a good principle for any artistic project at any time - if a child can relate to that then you are probably right track, "says Shaun Tan.

Already in her first picture book, The Viewer (1997) with text by Gary Crew, Shaun Tan stands out as a true postmodernist, and shows a mastery of the virtuoso visual development. "For the curious child in us all," it says as an introduction to The Viewer, which is a nightmare, science fiction-inspired play with perspective, time and space. The result is eerie and magnificent.

Shaun Tan points out what a big step work with The Rabbits (1998) did for him on a personal level. After initially not having made proper contact with the text, written by John Marsden, he eventually found a solution. He presented, as he puts it, "... more unexpected ideas for building your own parallel history. Not an illustration of the text, but something that could react symbiotically with it ".

The book depicts symbolic Australia's colonial past, or more generally what happens when a high-tech culture meets one that has its roots in nature.Shaun Tan describes The Rabbits as a story of power, ignorance and degradation, but also as a dark and serious animal fable, a narrative form that he believes that we all can understand. The distinct civilization critique in The Rabbits are often more or less pronounced in Shaun Tan's books and is one of his basic themes.

The Lost Thing (2000) is a multilayered, surrealistic tale of identity and alienation but also the opportunities. We meet here for the first time Shaun Tan as both songwriters and visual artists. It held back the text is translated into a magnificent visual representation, which depicts the strange encounter between narrator, the author's alter ego, and a giant creature that is both classical machine and living beings in the same body, "The Lost Thing".Already here a tension. How can something so big and spectacular as lost?Yes, almost invisible to most people. Could it be a symbol of the finder discovery of his own inner potential? One issue that becomes even stronger when "The Lost Thing" may come home to the narrator's family and the parents hardly notice it.

So the questions stacked on each other while Shaun Tan plays out his entire range of art-historical references and industry. We encounter stories embedded in stories. Collage technique, with layer upon layer of information, making each page invites you to a closer examination, a self-discovery. "All these elements combine to create a visual narrative that is at once both simple and accessible as complex and irreversible enigmatic, even to myself," said Shaun Tan. "It would not work if I understood too much of it.

The Lost Thing is, inter alia, been set up as a theater and also as a film, in 2011 awarded with an Oscar in the category of best animated short film.

The Red Tree (2001) based on children's and adults' tendency to describe their emotions through metaphors, such as monsters, storms, sunshine and rainbows. In the work of The Red Tree Shaun Tan wanted to reach beyond the clichés. Through the painted pictures he explores the expressive potential of these common fantasies. From the beginning, "says Shaun Tan, he had planned to depict even positive emotions, but the longer he arrived at work he found that" the negative feelings - particularly those concerned with loneliness and depression - was so much more interesting from both a personal and artistic point of view . 'The book tells of staggering beautiful tableaux, with greatly reduced text and without regular act, if a brittle little girl on his journey ends up in a number of different and rather frightening existential condition and moods before she returned home, find a symbol of hope - the growing little red tree in her own room.

In his association riches hold this open narrative many identification and interpretation opportunities that invite the reader to create your own new stories. The book has particular been set up as a theater and used for therapeutic purposes to benefit children and adults with severe medical conditions that put words to their feelings.

Shaun Tan's most acclaimed and innovative book, the broad-based, totally wordless graphic novel The Arrival (2006), is in all respects a remarkable epic works. This phase Shaun Tan an autobiographical theme he often returns to, being different, not fitting in, being on uncertain foreign soil. As a symbolic marker of the personal experiences he has given his own face to the main character.

The Arrival is about an immigrant family where the father goes to a new country and a long time to reunite with his family at the new location. The whole design is imbued with the magical realism that Shaun Tan so happy to work with. The book takes the form of a worn photo album with a light sepia tone leaf full of black and white cartoons.

The outer frame is tight, departure, arrival, meeting with the unfamiliar and frightening, alignment, unification. Naturalism is broken by the magic of the pictures where great figures - unknown animals and strange buildings - mixed with the familiar. This approach creates a strong mental images, one understands the reader with the migrant's vulnerability. The reader is affected by the drama that occurs when you have no language to express what the meeting with the new, incomprehensible and strange really means. The signs are written with characters that none of us can decipher.

The Arrival is a powerful book project, which took five years to complete. It leaves no one untouched. The book is characterized completely by Shaun Tan's determination never to compromise on his vision. In the wordless world vibrates a deeply humanistic tone, which is very characteristic of him.

In his latest book, anthology, Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008), "says Shaun Tan fifteen stories from growing up in suburbia, who often, according to Shaun Tan, characterized as a banal, mundane and even boring place. "But I think it is a fine substitute for the medieval forest of folk tale, a place for the subconscious," says Shaun Tan, and develops the idea of ​​suburbia double be: a visible and often a bit ridiculed article and a secret, unseen.

The book is faceted and genuine in their joy of narration. On approaching the modern myth, stories spring from seemingly mundane everyday things.Shaun Tan is here with a universal voice-authored longer texts combined with a wealth of images which maneret alternating between each story. He unleashes all his repertoire of artistic expression: pencil, ink, colored pencils, painting with various media, various printing techniques and - as in all his books - an astounding and rich overall design of all the book's parts down to the Colophon, contents and ISBN numbers . It is a great book design, an important component of Shaun Tan's ability to create visually stunning photo stories with people in mind.