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About the Author: Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated short film adaptation of the 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. He also wrote and illustrated the books The Red Tree and The Arrival. Born in Fremantle, Tan grew up in Perth.
Talking about The Lost Thing, Tan says “What started out as an amusing, nonsensical story about a freak soon developed into a fable concerning serious social issues, with a rather ambiguous ending. I became quite interested in the idea of a creature or person who really did not come from anywhere, or have an existing relationship to anything, and was ‘just plain lost’ as one character puts it. I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of a teenage boy, that would represent how I might personally respond to this situation.”
Synopsis: The Lost Thing is a humorous story about a boy who discovers a bizarre-looking creature while out collecting bottle-tops at the beach. Having guessed that it is lost, he tries to find out who owns it or where it belongs, but the problem is met with indifference by everyone else, who barely notice its existence.
Strangers, friends, parents are all unwilling to entertain this uninvited interruption to day-to-day life. In spite of his own reservations, the boy feels sorry for this hapless creature, and attempts to find out where it belongs.
Important: Shaun Tan emphasises that he writes picture books not children’s books. His books, like many picture books, deal with complex themes.
There is an appealing simplicity in the form, which is not to say that it is necessarily simple: the restrained coupling of text and image can contain any level of poetic sophistication or complexity. ‘Art,’ as Einstein reminds us, ‘is the expression of the most profound thoughts in the simplest way. Accordingly, Tan’s illustrations do not ‘explain’ text but build a landscape of questions and ideas.
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