Artist, storyteller and dreamer,
Shaun Tan, rocked Adelaide Writers Week by taking out both the prize for children's literature and the SA Premier's Award in a $25,000 scoop of radness for his book Tales from Outer Suburbia.
Tales from Outer Suburbia is a glorious mix of vignettes of everyday life with beautiful twists, all matched with Shaun's dreamy drawings. Silent buffaloes, lost deep sea divers, barking dogs and homemade pets all mix it up midst these pages and 15 ace stories.
There are a lot of terrible books for kids out there and lots of amazing artists who aspire to illustrate for children's lit without fully understanding that is is a tender balance of clever, mysterious, transformative, non-patronizing elements that cut it for kids. But Shaun is someone who totally gets the complexity of making a great picture book.
Shaun brilliantly points out that obvious, straight-up illustration is not always the best, " ... a good picture book has two texts that work together symbiotically, they can reveal different sides to the same story, or different stories altogether, involving disparity, irony and even contradiction. The best illustrations do not simply illustrate."
Shaun's double prize at the AWW is the first time anyone has pulled both awards together.