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On Friday my mum lent us her copy of Eric by Shaun Tan. On Saturday there was a wonderful newspaper interview of Shaun Tan, an interview by Neil Gaiman, no less, where the two author’s discussed the genesis of Eric’s story. And then on Sunday all the girls (and I) wanted to do was play “Eric”.

Eric is a foreign exchange student who has come to stay. His host family do their best to make Eric feel welcome but they never feel quite sure that Eric is enjoying his stay with them. And then one day, “with little more than a wave and a polite goodbye” Eric departs. The host family feel uneasy and a little confused until they find the secret Eric has left behind, a secret that shows Eric has indeed had a wonderful time.

Tan’s moving, thoughtful story is funny and profound; we cannot know the seeds we are planting with our behaviour and actions. But Eric allows us to believe that if we give people the space and time they need, if we are kind and generous, beautiful things will grow.

Eric also reminds me that even if people appear unmoved, uninvolved, they are not without emotion and internal life. Indeed, in the Guardian interview, Tan admits that Eric is perhaps a little autobiographical in this regard:

As an adolescent people would always say I was not expressive and they always made the mistake of thinking that I didn’t feel anything, because I didn’t react to things. My mind reacts but usually a long time after the fact – if something exciting happens I’ll just sort of go “okaaaay, let me process that”, and then three days later I’m excited about it, when everyone else has left the room.

Eric is a treasure of a book, the perfect book to match with the Chinese saying “A book is like a garden carried in your pocket”. It does fit perfectly in a pocket (or a Christmas stocking) and encourages us reflect with curiosity and trust on cultural differences (a recurring theme in Tan’s work) and how, even if differences are initially confounding they enrich our world.

M and J share this delight with the narrator of Eric:

Secretly I had been looking forward to having a foreign visitor – I had so many things to show him. For once I could be a local expert, a fountain of interesting facts and opinions.

Thanks to Zoe Toft at Playing by the Book for alerting me to this video of Shaun Tan’s award winning book The Arrival set to a musical score on the Sydney Opera House’s website.

Watch highlights of Shaun Tan’s visual masterpiece The Arrival featuring a live score by Ben Walsh and The Orkestra of the Underground.

The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images. With his Orkestra of the Underground, Ben Walsh pooled a diverse range of musical talent and composed a score to accompany Tan’s beautiful illustrations in a rare and unique audio-visual experience.

Click here to watch

Shaun Tan,
The Bird King and Other Sketches
Templar Publishing (UK), 2011; first published by Windy Hollow Books (Australia), 2010.

Ages 9 +

Shaun Tan’s beautifully produced sketchbook, The Bird King, generously lays bare the creative process of illustration. While not specifically designed for children, Tan’s familiar images are of instant, near-universal appeal, and his explanatory text will be a revelation to young fans, especially aspiring artists.

Tan’s introduction references Klee’s famous description of drawing as “taking a line for a walk.” The colored and black-and-white drawings are divided into sections. Images in which “one little drawing is enough” to suggest a whole story comprise the untold stories section. In book, theatre and film, Tan describes his preliminary sketches as “a constant reminder of what I was ‘getting at’ in the first place” during longer creative processes. In drawings from life, we see “ongoing studies in the relationship of line, form, colour and light” that are crucial to an artist’s lifelong process of learning to see. A final section, notebooks, is culled from small ball point pen sketches, doodles and scribbles, some “an equivalent to daydreaming” that Tan poetically compares to fishing: “casting loose lines into a random sea… catching ideas that might otherwise be hidden beneath the waves.”

The drawings themselves also include little notes, ideas for development, and titles that further decipher the artist’s visual language. One double-page drawing entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” features a dozen of Tan’s creatures marching behind a small boy, bird on his head, palette in hand. The only color on the page is a splash of orange dropping from his brush, repeated on the body of a goldfish, held aloft in a bowl, by a large creature with a diving bell head in which a bird in a beret stands at the wheel. In Tan’s quixotic imagination, the robotic and the humanizing hover in edgy balance.

The production quality of this small hardcover book is excellent. Partially bound in red cloth, with embossed lettering on the front cover, it’s held closed with a red elastic band; a blue ribbon bookmark is sewn into the binding. The back matter includes a list of the drawings in the book (noting materials used and the original purpose of each sketch) and a bibliography of Tan’s published works.

Young artists will learn more from studying the lines Tan takes for a walk than from any number of art classes. Children who already know and love books by the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner will recognize preliminary sketches of work from favorite books. For newcomers, The Bird King is a great introduction to this evocative Australian writer-illustrator.

Charlotte Richardson
February 2012

#65 The Arrival by Shaun Tan
30 points

This book is Epic. It doesn’t just “tell” an immigrant’s story, it magically (or I suppose, skillfully) brings us INTO the very experience. - Aaron Zenz

Because it’s a richly imagined, beautifully rendered, wordless graphic narrative of immigration, dislocation, and hope. - Phillip Nel

#68 then. #65 now.  There’s no question it belongs on this list.

So is it a picture book?  Well, let’s see.  It tells a story entirely with pictures and not a single word (or, at least, not a single word we can understand).  You might call it a graphic novel too, except it eschews thought bubbles and speech balloons.  Yet it does break itself into panels quite often… but can’t the same be said of many picture books, like The Adventures of Polo and the like?  Is there an age limit to it?  Maybe (there are some scary scenes) but when do children stop reading picture books?  Many read them for years, though often on the sly when around peers or siblings.

I hereby proclaim that until someone can pin down a definite genre for a book as amazing, miraculous, and downright fun as The Arrival, here it shall remain on this Top 100 Books poll.

My review back in the day of it said this about the plot: “A man prepares to leave his family for a new world. Tearfully they let him go as he boards a ship for another land. Once he arrives, however, he finds himself at a loss. Everything from the language to the buildings to the birds is strange here. The reader of this book sympathizes easily with the man since author/illustrator Shaun Tan has created a world that is just as odd to us as it is to our protagonist. Appliances consist of confusing pulls and toggles. People live and work in plate and cone-shaped structures, traveling via dirigibles and strange ship-shaped machinations of flight. As the man proceeds to discover how to find lodging, food, and work, he meets other immigrants who tell their own stories of hardship and escape. Through all this, our man grows richer for his experiences and even grows to love the odd little white-legged cat-sized tadpole creature that follows him everywhere. By the end, his family has arrived as well and the last image in the book is of his daughter as she helps another immigrant get directions in this dazzling and magnificent city.”

Are there those amongst ye who have not read this book?  Then go to it.  I could wax rhapsodic for days on end about the power and beauty of this story, but I’ll let the experts do it for me.

The New York Times said of it, ” ‘The Arrival’ tells not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story. . . The effect is mesmerizing. Reading ‘The Arrival’ feels like paging through a family treasure newly discovered up in the attic.”

Booklist said, “Filled with subtlety and grandeur, the book is a unique work that not only fulfills but also expands the potential of its form.”

The Washington Post said, “Hundreds of sepia-toned drawings, some tiny, some panoramic, all pulsing with detail, combine to produce an effect reminiscent of silent movies or mime, the absence of words forcing the eye and the brain to work harder.”

And Kirkus said, “It’s an unashamed paean to the immigrant’s spirit, tenacity and guts, perfectly crafted for maximum effect.”

As of this post, Shaun Tan has still not had a chance to visit Ellis Island.  And any questions you might have about the

International Books for Young People – IBBY – we’re on our way to London.

www.ibbycongress2012.org

Crossing Boundaries: Translations and Migrations, to be held at Imperial College, London, from 23rd to 26th August 2012.

It’s going to be fantastic and I get to see friends from all over the world.

Shaun Tan, Mark  Greenwood, Frane Lessac – the fantastic Aussie contingent of authors/illustrators from the West are coming.

Can’t wait to speak about ‘Ships in the Field’  on a panel with Marjorie Coughlan editor of Paper Tigers

Picture Books about Migration

Zeynep Bassa (Author and Illustrator, Turkey)
Picture Books on the Theme of Migration in Germany
Questions of migration, discrimination, social marginalisation and integration appear as newly emerging topics in children’s books. Based partially on the author’s personal experiences as a migrant mother of two children in Germany and from work with migrant children, this paper reviews some of the children’s books published in Germany on the subjects of tolerance and acceptance of different identities.

Marjorie Coughlan 
(Editor, Paper Tigers, U.K.)
Escaping Conflict, Seeking Peace: picture books that relate refugee stories, and their importance
Attention is drawn to picture books in English from around the world about children and young people who have been forced from their homes because of conflict. These are stories that need to be told, whether they are biographical or fictionalised accounts, for understanding of the past, healing in the present, and hope for the future.

Susanne Gervay (Author, Society of Children’s Writers and Illustrato

Drop everything! Paul Gravett has interviewed Shaun Tan! The Oscar winning artist of The Arrival, The Lost Thing and many other picture books is one of the most admired illustrators working today, and although Tan’s work often ends up being “comics” in that it is sequential, pictorial storytelling, as this interview makes clear, doing anything like comics is only something he backed into:

I think you’re building a mature relationship with comics without too many preconceived ideas. I think if you’d been immersed in them since childhood, perhaps you’d have had a system in place that would have been difficult to escape from?

Yeah I would have taken them for granted. But as it is, comics seemed quite a strange way of telling a story which is what intrigues me. My attraction to picture books was word-picture relationships and how pared down they can be and still make sense and also have these big gaps in between. The best comics maximise this relationship between language and image that’s not explanatory. They’re both doing different functions. It’s quite a natural extension, but that said I don’t feel like a comics artist.

This guy called Aki, an IT specialist from Helsinki, came to stay with us for two weeks. We set up a bedroom for him. In the Eric story, the exchange student prefers to sleep in the kitchen pantry, which is tolerated because the family want him to be comfortable. When Aki was staying with us, he would get on with his studies, bent over a book, reading intently, I could see him through the gap in the door. Whenever I am doing an illustration, no matter how fanciful it is, there is always some reference to something in my own life. Not to be autobiographical but because it helps me draw the picture. It helps you project emotion into the picture. It’s very difficult to just draw things without feeling.

Awards, translations, migrations and a mix of people from 52 countries, were all part of the hectic week-end that comprised the International IBBY Conference hosted by IBBY UK here in London at the end of August.

There were too many absolutely brilliant workshops and talks to identify individually. UK authors and illustrators - Michael Rosen, Marcus Sedgewick, Michael Morourgo, Aiden Chambers and Anthony Browne were there but into the mix came other heady spice, texture and flavour from international experts in children’s literature and luminaries such as Shaun Tan, Peter Sis, Bart Moeyaert and Kitty Crowther, winner of the Astrid Lingen Award for Illustration.

Highlight of the week-end had to be the Hans Christian Andersen Ceremony with the Author award going to María Teresa Andruetto from Argentina and Illustrator award going to Peter Sis from the Czech Republic. I couldn’t help feeling that the venue of the Science Museum at night with its surreal spotlights was the perfect setting for Peter Sis’s drawings. The machines seem to take on a life of their own...

Some of the work of the short-listed illustrators and some IBBY Honour titles are shown below - exciting, unusual, different.  For more events and people see Candy Gourlay’s blog. The fine linear work of Roger Mello from Brazil who was short-listed...,

By now, I’m sure you already heard that Shaun Tan, amazing creator behind The Arrival, Tales from Outer Suburbia, and so on and such, was this year’s recipient of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.  Why should you care?  Well apart from the fact that it’s always nice to see genius rewarded, there is the small matter surrounding the money that comes with the prize.  Second only to the Nobel in terms of price, I believe, the Lindgren Award is the most money an author or illustrator of children’s books can win.  It amounts to 5 million krona, or $764,600.  Wowzer.

Lest you pooh-pooh the win by saying that Shaun Tan is always a surefire bet, check out this list of the 2011 candidates.  It’s not easy to beat out Quentin Blake, Eric Carle, Neil Gaiman, the International Youth Library, Julius Lester, and many talented others in one fell swoop, but Mr. Tan managed it.

Of course I was present when they announced the win.  See?

Er . . . Okay, admittedly I’m a little obscured here.  Uh, see the balding guy with the glasses and the gray suit, dead center?  I’m right behind him.  Hello!  Of greater note, Kitty Crowther, last year’s winner (Belgium), is front and center.  Thanks to the Astrid Memorial Award for the photo.

You can learn more about the award on its blog, which is fun.  If you’d like to see how the announcement went down, Cristiana from The Tea Box was kind enough to record the moment:

And this would be incomplete without Mr. Tan’s reaction as well: