Shaun tan author biography john
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Books By Shaun Tan - Author
Shaun Tan was born in 1974 and grew up in the nordlig suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. In school he became known as the “good drawer” which partly compensated for always being the shortest kid in every class. He graduated from the University of WA in 1995 with joint honours in Fine Arts and English Literature, and currently works full time as a freelance artist and author, concentrating mostly on writing and illustrating picture books.
Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since then he has received numerous awards for his picture books, including the CBCA (Children’s Book Council of Australia) Picture Book of the Year Award for The Rabbits with John Marsden. In 2001 Shaun was named Best Artist at the World Fantasy Awards in Montreal. He has recently worked for Blue Sky Studios and Pixar, providing concept artwork for forthcoming films. He has
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A masterly visual storyteller
Visually spectacular pictorial narratives with a constant human presence
This text was written in 2011 by members of the award jury.
Shaun Tan is an illustrator and author. He was born 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
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THE RABBITS
The Rabbits, written by Australian author John Marsden, is a fable about colonisation, told from the viewpoint of the colonised. An unseen narrator describes the coming of ‘rabbits’ in the most minimal detail, an encounter that is at first friendly and curious, but later darkens as it becomes apparent that the visitors are invaders. The style of the book is deliberately sparse and strange, with both text and image conveying an overall sense of bewilderment and anxiety as native numbat-like creatures witness environmental devastation under the wheels of a strange new culture.
The parallels with a real history of colonisation in Australia and around the world are obvious, and based on detailed research, in spite of the overt surrealism of the imagery and the absence of direct references. It was named Picture Book of the Year by the Children’s Book Council of Australia in 2000, which generated some controversy due to its confronting themes, and was attacked on sev