More Storybook Illustration

"THE ARRIVAL" An international best seller, Shaun Tan's wordless story tells of an immigrant who leaves the Old Country for a dreamlike metropolis.


Shaun Tan, the illustrator here, recently won an Oscar as co-director of "The Lost Thing" a short animated film based on one of his picture books. In it, a young man collecting bottle caps at the beach befriends a tentacled beast with a bright red metal shell and tries to find a home for it in a cheerless city where people ignore such anomalies. Repeatedly, Tan's protagonists seem like lonely characters who manage to see things in the world that others ignore. He wrote "The Red Tree" about a solitary girl who endures crushing tableaus only to find happiness later in the red tree that has begun to grow at her home.
- Tan arrived in a big way this year, when he received the Astrid Lindgren Memoral Award, a prize of $765,000 for children's illustration, in addition to his past honors including the Hugo and World Fantasy awards.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/magazine/mag-24Tan-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Shuan%20Tan&st=cse