As a painter, I also noticed that thirty-two pages-the standard picture book format-was also about as many images as you’d find in a typical gallery exhibition.

I was also fortunate to work with a couple of writers who had similar mixed backgrounds-writing for both adults and children-and were interested in picture books that were not just for very young readers. But I was interested in narrative illustration in short forms, and I could see that picture books were the closest thing to the kind of storytelling that excited my imagination. I’d also just come from an arts degree studying postmodern literature and contemporary fine art and, well, not knowing much about children’s genre fiction at all. Long answer: I actually came to picture books about twenty years ago as a freelance illustrator mainly interested in adult sci-fi and fantasy magazine illustration, a hobby of mine since my mid-teens. To me, there’s no reason why one form can’t move across different audiences, subjects, and degrees of complexity, and I always enjoy when artists and writers do this and so try to do the same myself. It may be for historical, cultural, social, institutional, or economic reasons-but not artistic ones.

I do believe that certain art forms have found themselves stuck with certain preconceptions for no good artistic reason. Do you feel as if this label constrains your work, or do you readily identify with it? Do you think we perhaps underestimate the power of children’s literature and its related forms, such as picture books, to explore difficult subject matters? Nonetheless, it is marketed as a children’s book.

The Arrival tackles incredibly complex themes of migration, displacement, the comfort of familiarity (and the wonder and fear experienced without it), the desire to belong, and the will to survive. In this Q&A, we discuss the extensive process Shaun Tan went through to create such a masterful, heart-filled story. Wordless, The Arrival relies solely on the strength of its images to show how our anxieties, dreams, and capacity for resilience tie us all together, regardless of language or location. Shaun Tan’s critically acclaimed and award-winning graphic novel The Arrivalis a visually stunning and emotionally visceral tale of finding a new home in a foreign place.

Shaun tan interview the arrival