Shaun tan brief biography of maya king

Shaun Tan, the son of a Malaysian-Chinese father and an Anglo-Irish mother, is a multi-award winning artist and writer who lives and works in Melbourne as at As a child growing up in Perth, Shaun enjoyed reading, writing and illustrating poems and stories; and spent a lot of time drawing dinosaurs, robots and space ships.

Shaun tan brief biography of maya king: During our first week back we

He was impressed by a book of horror poems called The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight , written by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated 'in these creepy but also amusing pen and ink drawings by Arnold Lobel. I can still recall the images quite vividly, and borrowed that book many times from the library. Tan also remembers Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick which he still admires as an adult as an ideal picture book experiment - a whole series of fragmentary sentences and singular strange drawings never fully explained.

He also liked Fungus the Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs, but only discovered many of his other books and acknowledges their influence as an adult. Quentin Blake and Roald Dahl were also 'favourites'. As a teenager, Tan was mostly influenced by the short stories of Ray Bradbury, which seemed to him like strange dreams or adult fairy tales. Visually, Tan was probably influenced more by movies and television; the first Star Wars films, for example, are remembered for their designs much more than for the storyline.

He participated in a special art program at secondary school but since then he has undertaken to teach himself the art of book illustration. Some of his earliest works appeared in science fiction magazines including Eidolon and Interzone where he illustrated the work of authors such as Greg Egan , Karen Attard , Sean Williams , and Leanne Frahm.

In , he won the International Illustrators of the Future Contest, the first Australian to achieve this award.