Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer, and filmmaker known for illustrated books that make the strange feel familiar. Born in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1974, he grew up drawing constantly and built a career telling stories where ordinary suburban life brushes up against the surreal. His best known book, The Arrival, follows a migrant using no words at all, only sepia-toned pictures of an invented world that capture the confusion and wonder of landing somewhere completely foreign.

His art blends painstaking, painterly detail with a dreamlike imagination, and it keeps circling back to belonging, memory, and the feeling of being out of place. He won an Academy Award in 2011 for the animated short film based on his book The Lost Thing, and that same year he received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, one of the largest prizes in children's literature. Though his books are usually shelved as children's stories, their melancholy and depth land just as hard with adults, which is a big part of why his following runs so wide.