An Author Embodies His Books’ Childlike Spirit
Christopher Capozziello for The New York TimesThe illustrator and author Tomi Ungerer is experienceing a career renaissance. Several of his children’s books have been reissued and a documentary about his life will be released this fall. More Photos »
By PAMELA PAUL
Published: June 28, 2011
Continue reading "The Child in Tomi Ungerer Remains Undimmed - NYTimes.com" »
Shaun Tan wins Astrid Lindgren prize
World's richest children's literature award goes to Australian author-illustrator, described as a 'masterly visual storyteller'
Shaun Tan was awarded the Astrid Lindgren prize for being 'a masterly visual storyteller'. Photograph: Martin Argles for the GuardianThe Australian author-illustrator Shaun Tan is the winner of this year's Astrid Lindgren prize – the richest children's literature prize in the world, with a purse of 5m kroner (£490,000).
Tan is the second Australian to be awarded the prize in its nine-year history, following Sonya Hartnett's win in 2008.
Continue reading "Shaun Tan wins Astrid Lindgren prize | Children's books | guardian.co.uk" »
Directors Shaun Tan (right) and Andrew Ruhemann win the Oscar for best animated film for 'The Lost Thing'. Picture: AP/Matt Sayles Source: AP
MORE than a decade ago Shaun Tan was an unemployed illustrator not sure where his life was headed.
In the end, life has worked out nicely for the 37-year-old born in Fremantle, Western Australia, but now a resident of Melbourne.
Tan, you could say, is an accidental Oscar winner.
"I started off as an illustrator with no formal training other than high school," Tan said, stunned as he stood backstage at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood with his gold statuette for short animated film The Lost Thing, won with British co-director Andrew Ruhemann.
The 15-minute computer generated and hand-painted movie was only supposed to be a picture book.
"I originally wrote this story in 1998," Tan said.
"I was an unemployed illustrator. I wrote it on the kitchen table of my share house, worked on it for a year, developed it as a picture book, which was then published in Melbourne around 2000. "
The story is set in Melbourne and is about a boy who, while collecting bottle caps near a beach, discovers a strange creature that seems to be a combination of an industrial boiler, a crab and an octopus.~ AAP
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N.B. View the film of The Lost Thing here.
An Oscar for Shaun Tan?
By Chelsey Philpot --> February 24, 2011
Shaun Tan
Photo by Inari KiuruShaun Tan may have to make room on his shelves for an Oscar. The award-winning author and illustrator best known for his wordless graphic novel, The Arrival (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Bks., 2007), has been nominated in the Best Short Film (Animated) category for The Lost Thing, where he makes his directorial debut along with co-director, Andrew Ruhemann.
Based on Tan's 2005 picture book of the same name, The Lost Thing (Simply Read) tells the story of a curious boy who discovers an odd-looking creature on the beach—and learns about cruelty and indifference while trying to help it find its place.
We caught up with Tan at home in Australia before he headed to Los Angeles to attend the 83rd Academy Awards ceremony on February 27.
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John Burningham has been creating picture books for almost 50 years, and his use of colour lithography along with his eccentric narratives have made him one of the defining illustrators of our time.
Mr Gumpy and Other Outings: Celebrating 50 years of John Burningham's work is on display at Seven Stories, the national centre for children's books, until 17 March 2011. The exhibition reveals Burningham's creative process through artwork, rough sketches, dummy books, letters, photos and childhood toys from his personal archive.
More here.
Lara Jones was best known for the Poppy Cat series
via guardian.co.ukPosted via web from daphnelee's posterous
My daughter the children's author and illustrator Lara Jones, who has died of malignant melanoma, aged 34, was best known for her Poppy Cat series of books. She produced other characters (Lola and Binky, and Davy the Dinosaur) and illustrated books by other authors (I Want a Mini Tiger by Joyce Dunbar being her final work), but Poppy Cat was her most successful endeavour, selling millions of copies worldwide. It is currently in production for television, to be screened on the Nick Jr channel in the autumn.
Continue reading "Lara Jones obituary | Books | The Guardian" »
The picture book exhibition, What a Wonderful World: A Multicultural Journey Through Text and Pictures, began on 1st October at Kinokuniya Bookstore in KLCC Suria, and will run until 31st October.
Books displayed include Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan, written by Mary Williams and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie.
Here are some words from Christie about his work on the book and also his thoughts about multicultural literature:
If the reader reads in between the lines they will see that the beginning of this story is universal. Simply put , he lives in a place with a certain type of structure and his development as a person is derived from this structure. Cattle herding, land and family is what Garang knew and in an instant he was thrust in to the dark of a Sudanese night far away from all that was recognizable. The point for me is that things can change in an instant and I believe it's important to know the stories of as many cultures as possible because there are lessons in those past journeys.
"For the past decade I believe that we live in a new world order and with all of our technology and instantaneous information, our privacy is gone and it's very difficult to know what the future of the world will be five years from now. I felt this way when illustrating Brothers in Hope and still do now. As the Illustrator of this book I want to take you to this real life child's world. I feel that the landscape is as important as his interaction with these thousands of children. Africa is alive, and a continent so large that you could fit China, the USA, Western Europe,India, Argentina and the British Isles combined in to it. So when starting the project I had to really take myself to a place that I had never been. I had to put my self into society that I never lived and in a situation that I never fully experienced.
For this particular children's book, I wanted an embracing style, flat and graphic overall but with a lot of movement and energetic earthy tones when it came to the landscape. I wanted a folk art like naive representation of the figures almost doll like but with depth and emotions in the facial rendering. This is because the story is a honest one, tales of children being hunted, surviving against the elements, war, famine and deserves to be represented truthfully. However, with all of this the book is about Hope and in most cases there was a light at the end of the tunnel for these children. Such a journey is a lesson for all cultures and ethnicities.
This is why such a spotlight on Brothers in Hope is not only an honor for me but also I suspect for the thousands of children that survived this ordeal. It is my hope that as viewers in Kinokuniya Bookstore are introduced to this book they take it as an opportunity to reflect on how quickly a life can change. Personally I've always have been drawn to the more challenging end of the children's book spectrum. The part that entails social issues or stories about history and culture, although these subjects are often difficult to speak about, children's book are a tool to play a role in a child's creativity and development while growing in to adulthood." ~ R. Gregory Christie
Interview by DAPHNE LEE
MOST people tend to associate picture books with simple stories, illustrated with simple, brightly coloured pictures. Of course, those with a more intimate knowledge of this medium of storytelling know that there is more to picture books than just pretty pictures that simply offer a visual description of a straightforward, basic text.
Picture books may deal with complex and difficult themes and subject matter, and this may be reflected in either the text or the art, or both.
Tan's art is striking and detailed, rather surreal in content and style. The richly tinted, deeply unsettling images in The Red Tree manage to convey the idea of that small glimmer of hope that keeps many people going through the worst of times.
Tales from Outer Suburbia is a collection of 15 short ... I hesitate to even call them stories. Some seem like fragments that have no beginning or end. Most tantalise the reader, offering glimpses into strange worlds or strange views of this world.
Tan's father hails from Ipoh, Perak, and met his Australian wife when he was an engineering student in an Australian university. Tan was born in Perth and visited Malaysia when he was a boy but doesn't remember much of it.
Apart from writing and painting, he has worked as a theatre designer, and did concept art for the films Horton Hears a Who and Pixar's WALL-E.
Continue reading "Tales of Mystery and Imagination: An Interview with Shaun Tan " »
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