Neil Gaiman’s interview with Shaun Tan

Photo: Colin McPherson/Guardian

“I met Shaun Tan for the first time in 1996, at a science-fiction convention in Perth, and only half-remember meeting him. He’s quiet, shy, generally unassuming. I got to know him slightly better with each subsequent trip to Australia, and he got used to me introducing myself to him and him telling me that actually we’d already met. He’s an artist and a writer and now a director, possessor of a peculiar and singular vision. As an artist he combines real drawing skill with a profoundly off-kilter imagination, his characters, human and otherwise, are at the same time funny and enticing; as a writer and storyteller he creates stories, sometimes wordless, always told with an economy of words, which manage to be both alienating and embracing: a child on a beach finds an alien monster inside something (a box? a house? a spaceship?) and brings it home, dealing with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy; an immigrant comes to live in a distant country where everything is different and inexplicable; a foreign exchange student is a tiny, leaf-like botanist; surreal images of depression and hopelessness almost, but do not, overwhelm a small girl, and at the last there is magic and hope.”

Read Neil Gaiman’s (Guardian) interview with this year’s ALMA recipient here.

Tags: Shaun Tan