Shaun Tan, will he need a bigger mantlepiece?
Shaun Tan’s celebrated book The Arrival has been awarded the Horn Book Special Citation for excellence in graphic storytelling.
The Horn Book is the leading American review journal for young people’s books and is edited by Roger Sutton.
Also worth noting is the Fiction and Poetry category winner. It’s Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. We have been banging on about this book since an import copy came our way in February. Alexie’s authentic story of a poor fourteen-year-old native American boy who turns his back on the reservation comes with fantastic illustrations by Ellen Forney.
The Australian edition comes out in August from Random House.
June 20th, 2008 at 12:50 am
Woohoo! I *love* Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I don’t think I’ve ever simultaneously cried and laughed as much as I did while reading that book.
Congrats to Shaun Tan too, very well deserved.
July 28th, 2008 at 9:52 am
I have read both ‘The Arrival’ and ‘The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,’ and I adored them both. My teacher at school is very keen on Shaun Tans’ books and let me borrow her copy of The Arrival, I looked at it for hours, analysing both the detail of the illustrations and how the story went. My conclusion was that he was trying to show how a place can be both different and the same, depending wether you look at the places and the people, or the attitude of the places and people.
I wonder what other people think?