interest to Shaun, who says: “I love seeing their sketches and clumsy roughs; and while I don’t like seeing my own all that much, I figure they must hold a similar fascination for others.” With the publication of The Bird King and other Sketches, a selection of his notebooks, he sees this interest as something of a dialogue where “all artists draw on the culture around them, and constantly learn from others. I’m very keen that anything I’ve figured out is shared again, giving back to that culture, and helping to raise the level of discourse.”
Storytelling
Asked about his own influences, Shaun explains: “I’m basically drawn to any work that’s quite imaginative, but still very attached to real-world concerns and especially ‘true’. That is, with an honest and authentic voice, with a feeling of urgent, self-sufficient utterance. As in ‘here’s something that must be shown, and this is the only way to really show it’. I think we all get that feeling when we come across a good book.”
Shaun considers his approach to storytelling, explaining: “The interesting thing about creating any story is that you quickly become aware that there are a thousand-plus ways to tell it, to show it, to design it. Creativity is less about inventing things – we all invent things at a rate of knots, even in our sleep – it’s probably more about making choices, millions of little decisions. How a character looks, how to describe a room, whether to switch that character and room out for something else completely.”
We discuss the Oscar winning animated short which he directed based on The Lost Thing, and how “the art of telling a story is about honouring the core themes and feelings, not so much the style, to not fetishise the form of things too much, or get too caught up in ideas of absolute rightness, perfect voice or whatever. Like all life, it’s an evolutionary process. I certainly enjoy seeing different remakes of films, or adaptations from books to comics to film and back again, and then thinking why one version worked better than another, I’ve learnt a lot from that. Especially the bad versions, they are actually very educational!’
Tales that Grow Shaun speaks about The Singing Bones, a collection of fairytales by the Brothers Grimm and retold by Philip Pullman with sculptural illustrations by Shaun. He says: “It’s interesting what Philip Pullman says in his introduction to Grimm Tales from Young and Old, his own retelling of classic tales, that these are stories that should be retold with variations. That is their history, their mode of evolution and survival, even before the Grimm Brothers got to them. This is how stories carry on.’ Does illustration help to make these stories more accessible? Shaun is clear on this, saying: “Certainly, the beauty of illustration is its ability to bypass differences of languages, especially if you are showing work, say at an international book fair. I’m not sure how writers manage that, it must be trickier to court an audience as immediately, even if you have a brilliant manuscript. Certainly The Arrival was a breakthrough book for me internationally, perhaps because you didn’t need to translate a thing, and a foreign publisher could decide quite immediately if they were interested or not. Not only does it lack words, it lacks cultural specificity, being set in a fictional country. I think since that work came out in 2006, I’ve been published in about 20 languages and
Autumn-Winter 2020
many more territories, with growing interest in my older books which, thank goodness, have stood the test of time.”
Following his Kate Greenaway Medal-winning Tales from the City and home-schooling his two young children during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s hard not to wonder what will be next for Shaun. Conversations are happening around adapting Tales from Outer Suburbia into a television series, and Shaun says: “That’s a long and temperamental process, very far from certain, but it’s interesting regardless of the outcome. The changes in television format and style precipitated by online streaming, and advancements in animation have meant that such adaptations are possible and even feasible, especially for less conventional narrative. I also have a number of books I’d like to do, but I’m not sure when. One is a comic, a format I’ve not used for a long time, about a girl who does not realise that she is the only human in a world of non-humans, and is then confronted with that realisation unexpectedly. It’s actually a variation on other stories, really, from The Lost Thing to The Arrival, of strangers in strange lands. “For some reason I always come back to this central
idea, as you mentioned earlier, of displacement. It’s like a question that never ceases to find an answer, and maybe that’s why it remains so fascinating and versatile, both for myself and other readers.” PEN&INC.
l Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan (9781406383843) Walker Books
www.walker.co.uk
Seeing Sense Jake Hope
AVAILABLE NOW
“In our increasingly visual world, we all need to be able to decode images to understand their effects. Jake Hope uses interviews and case studies of those who make, publish and mediate picture books, to show how the very first art form children encounter can be harnessed to help them learn and acquire the skills they need to navigate the world.”
– Professor Kim Reynolds, Professor of Children’s Literature, Newcastle University, Past President of International Research Society for Children’s Literature.
2020 | 224 pages | Paperback | 9781783304417 Price: £39.95
PEN&INC. 29
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