Meet the author

Shaun Tan.

Writer & illustrator · Australia · b. 1974

Shaun Tan: Australian author-illustrator behind The Arrival, The Red Tree and The Lost Thing — surreal, melancholy, technically virtuosic picture books often closer to gallery art than to standard picture-book reading.

Shaun Tan is an Australian author-illustrator born in 1974 in Perth, whose visually extraordinary books sit at the boundary between picture book and gallery art. Best known for The Arrival (2006), a wordless graphic novel about migration, told in sepia-toned dreamlike imagery that has become one of the most-taught picture books in secondary-school English curricula, plus The Red Tree, The Lost Thing, Tales from Outer Suburbia, and Rules of Summer. Tan's work is melancholy, surreal, technically virtuosic, and not always conventionally child-facing; many of his books are read more by older children, teens and adults than by the picture-book audience. Academy Award winner (The Lost Thing animated short). A genuine art-book picture-book maker.