Shaun Tan

Position
Premiere date: July 28, 2020
Bio/Description

This July, our guest is multiple award winning, and New York Times bestselling, author, illustrator, artist, and filmmaker, Shaun Tan.

For over two decades, Shaun Tan has created unique worlds with his books, graphic novels, and artistic projects like The ArrivalTales from Outer SuburbiaRules of SummerLost & FoundThe Bird KingThe Singing Bones, Tales from the Inner City, and Cicada.

The cardinal points in Tan’s work are connection and disconnection, the natural world and the unnatural urbanized world. Tan deftly abolishes the boundaries between them, however, with his unrivaled imagination. Hybrid machine beasts, spires and towers, a glorious illuminated garden, an orca swimming above a grid of city lights…Tan presents these wonders while also exploring the essential connections between everything. How we connect to ourselves, how we connect to one another, how we connect with animals, how we connect with the environment. And how, at times, we fail to make these connections, or even damage them.

Distinct, expansive, fanciful, foreboding, playful, powerful, beautiful, and thought-provoking, Tan infuses his pages and canvases with a vision unlike anyone else.

Tan’s career has included New York Times bestselling and multiple award-winning books, as well as a diversity of fantastic collaborative projects. He won an Academy Award for his short film The Lost Thing, and also received the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for outstanding contributions to children’s literature.

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