About the Author

Shaun Tan grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. He graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1995 with joint honours in Fine Arts and English Literature and currently works as an artist and author in Melbourne. Tan demonstrated a talent for drawing as a child and his first illustration was published in 1990 in a magazine called ‘Aurealis’. The mediums he uses for his works are ink, charcoal, photocopies, pen, acrylic and linocuts. Tan also uses collage work with various types of materials like metal, glass and cuttings from books. He even used dead insects on occasion for this purpose.

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Tan is the winner of the 2011 Astrid Lindgren prize, the world’s richest children’s literature award. The award described Shaun as ‘a masterly visually storyteller’. The film adaptation of The Lost Thing, also by Tan, won the Oscar for best animated short film in 2011.