Shaun Tan has been announced as the winner of the 2020 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for his extraordinary collection Tales from the Inner City,  a collection of illustrated stories and poems exploring the shifting relations between the natural and human environments and the interconnectedness is suffused through these.  Julia Hale, 2020 Chair of judges for the awards describes it as 'a masterwork of illustration'.  YLG was delighted to discuss the awards and illustration with Shaun.

The Kate Greenaway is awarded for outstanding illustration, what qualities do you think make illustration outstanding and how important is it for children and young people?

Gosh, that’s that big question! I guess the word outstanding, broken down, means work that stands out, maybe stands apart a little bit. It’s very hard to put one’s finger on what that is, either in the noise of a book fair or the silence of one’s own desk, but you know it when you see it. It just grabs your attention and demands a second look, then and third, a fourth. Other work may not strike you immediately, but will reward sustained attention, will keep on paying dividends. I think that’s basically the measure of good illustration, if you can keep returning to it again and again, seeing different things, sustaining a certain fire of joy or disturbance, something you could hang on your wall forever and be perfectly happy to see it every morning. But there are no set rules for what that is, it doesn’t even have to be well drawn. To be honest, I’m still trying to figure that out – what makes an outstanding illustration.

How important it is for children and young people? Probably best to ask them individually. But to hazard a guess, I would say simple inspiration. Certainly the feedback I get from most young people involves them wanting to let me know that I’ve inspired them to draw and write. I really appreciate that, because it reminds me of the way I was inspired by other artists and writers as a young person. Just that feeling of mind-opening excitement when certain images reveal a whole new way of looking at the world. I think that’s probably the greatest contribution of illustrated books, especially where the reader is aware that they are created by individuals, people not so different from themselves. It inspires further creativity. Each good book is saying ‘look at what you can do with little more than words and drawings’. It’s an invitation to be an artist, the artist that I believe everybody is, regardless of whether they practice a craft. Just using imagination to test your experience of the world, to see things from other points of view, that makes you an artist.

The mission statement for the awards is to ‘inspire and empower the next generation to create a better world through books and reading.’  To what extent do you feel stories and art are able to act as agents of change?

Good question. I think that basically stories are the way that humans think about complex issues. We are an animal that thinks through story. That probably goes back a very long way, where stories, as a chain of events involving various places, characters and emotions, allowed successive generation to remember very big and complex things. Indigenous Australians are particularly good at this, and have been for thousands of years, understanding an intricate and vast geography through songlines and dreaming stories, connecting narrative directly with the land.

In other contexts, I believe stories have a similar function, they lay down ‘dreaming tracks’ in the mind, provide examples of possible outcomes to possible problems. When faced with a difficult situation, we may well be reminded of an anecdote, a book, a film or any story that suggests a way forward, and the principles to follow – particularly ideas about truth, integrity and empathy. That last one is the most important. Stories are basically about empathy, of imagining what it would be like to be someone else. And then recognising that there is no single story – contrary to fundamentalist thinking – but thousands, well, billions. Lots of different ways that things can go, including ways you cannot yet conceive of. Isn’t that why we read? To see something play out that we could not have imagined alone, to be curious about that, to want to think about it carefully. That’s a very good thing to be interested in. That open-mindedness will help you adapt to whatever life throws at you. And it’s going to throw a lot, the good, the bad, the incomprehensible, the downright depressing. How can you take that all in and still move forward?

You’ve spoken in the past about unease with the term ‘illustration’, are there better or more apt terms?

Of course, the definitions of words broaden out in time, so it doesn’t really matter – and certainly a century or so of children’s book illustration has helped with that a great deal. Anyone who appreciates it well knows that it is not about literal ‘illustration’. That said, the term is still misleading for a mainstream that does not study it closely, and it leads to economic, educational and institutional divisions which tend to favour other art forms over book illustration.

When I was an art student, it was actually considered a derogatory term. But I would then be confused by those celebrated painters who, to my eye, where creating close equivalents to book illustration… When I visited the Sistine Chapel for instance, it looked a lot like commercial illustration to me, albeit for an unusual client. Actually the majority of painters throughout history are illustrators, especially if you look beyond western modernism. When I look at Ancient Egyptian friezes, cave paintings, medieval tapestries, Aztec codices, Hindu temples, I see illustrated, figurative stories, very close to picture books and comics. Images that show things happening, with implied beginnings, middles and endings. So I tend to think in terms of narrative painting and drawing. Some art is about singular impressions, either abstract or figurative, and others are about specific things happening, they are narrative images, or ‘illustration’. I have similar thoughts about science fiction and fantasy, that it seems to me more of an historical mainstream than a modern subgenre. So much of human visual culture is basically fantasy illustration.

In any case, I think a lot of those straitjackets of language and definition are dissolving as more and more artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers cross over, or work in different fields simultaneously. Also, it’s nice to see that the boundaries between children’s and adult literature are often transgressed, and that my own books have come to be regarded as either-or. I think we spend too much time talking about differences between groups of readers and creators, when really those differences are often just statements of convenience. We are not too different from each other when it comes to appreciating good art.

You’ve experimented significantly with ideas of media and form from your graphic novel, ’The Arrival’ through to the ‘The Singing Bones’ with its use of sculpture?  How do you decide the form and media to use for different projects and how easy is it to garner the support of publishers?

I’ve been pretty lucky to have those opportunities, and to work with very adventurous editors and publishers. Occasionally it’s taken a bit of convincing when the medium doesn’t sound intuitively practical – sculpture for instance – but in each case I would do a few experiments to prove a point, a few complete pages of The Arrival or a few sculptures inspired by Grimm’s fairy tales. Largely to check for myself if they work, particularly because it’s a big commitment to make a book, and I have to fully believe in a style and technique before taking that on. I know when it works when it feels logical or intuitively right, when it does not feel like I’m forcing anything.

The analogy that comes to mind is a puppet; you start by pulling the strings, building and controlling, and if it then begins moving by itself you can cut those manipulative strings. The style and medium is working, movement and feeling flows through it naturally. Good editors can see that too, that is what they are skilled in understanding, sometimes even more so than an artist. Often those experiments don’t work, it feels like you are endlessly pulling strings, masking some falseness, and you start again with something else. The Arrival was very much like that, the final pencilled form is very different from an original, cartoony version, and before that a simplified sculptural version. It was very difficult, and I almost gave up on it, but glad that I kept experimenting until I found a relatively simple solution, albeit a very long one!