Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Beside The Lost Thing, The Red Tree and The Arrival are books he has written and illustrated.

Tan was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1974 and grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. In 2006, his wordless graphic novel The Arrival won the Book of the Year prize as part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. The same book won the Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year award in 2007. and the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards Premier's Prize in 2006.

Tan's work has been described as an "Australian vernacular" that is "at once banal and uncanny, familiar and strange, local and universal, reassuring and scary, intimate and remote, guttersnipe and sprezzatura. No rhetoric, no straining for effect. Never other than itself."

For his career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" Tan won the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council, the biggest prize in children's literature.

Arrival

Arrival or Arrivals may refer to:

Film and television

Gaming

Literature

Music

Albums

Lost

Lost may refer to:

Cinema and television

Literature

Music

Albums

The Lost Thing

The Lost Thing is a picture book written and illustrated by Shaun Tan that was also adapted into an Academy Award-winning animated short film.

Plot

Set in the near future, in dystopian Melbourne, Australia, The Lost Thing is a story about Shaun who enjoys collecting bottle tops for his bottle top collection. One day, while collecting bottle tops near a beach, he discovers a strange creature, that seems to be a combination of an industrial boiler, a crab, and an octopus. This creature is referred to as "The Lost Thing" by the narrator.

Shaun realizes the creature is lost and out of place. He attempts to find its owner or otherwise its source but is not able to, due to the indifference of everyone else. Pete, an opinionated friend of Shaun's, explains that it may not actually belong anywhere. When he seeks help from a government agency, he is met by a creature who warns that the department exists only to hide and forget about uncategorizable things, and gives him a business card with an arrowhead sign on it. After searching much of the city for the sign, which they find and follow numerous times, Shaun discovers a utopian land for lost things, where he parts ways with the creature, and continues on with his life - although he was unable to say whether the creature, or any of the others, really belonged there.