Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan is the Australian author-illustrator whose work occupies the rare middle ground between picture book, graphic novel and surrealist gallery piece. The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel about migration, is the high-water mark; The Red Tree is a quiet, lavishly painted book about depression that has been used in therapeutic contexts for decades; The Lost Thing, Eric and Cicada are shorter, sadder, funnier pieces in the same vein. Visually his books are dense, sepia-toned, full of strange machines and small lonely figures in vast spaces, closer to early-twentieth-century European painting than to most children's-book illustration. They reward adult co-reading and stay with children who encounter them at the right moment.

Singular wordless and near-wordless picture books that work as art objects, for thoughtful older children, teens, and adults.

Primary themes

• Belonging
• Creativity and imagination
• Identity
• Loneliness
• Migration and displacement

Tone palette

• Melancholic
• Bittersweet
• Thought provoking
• Whimsical