Australian illustrator Shaun Tan has won a prestigious award for children's literature, local media reported on Wednesday.
Tan, who has illustrated more than 20 books, including The Rabbits (1998), The Red Tree (2001), The Arrival (2006) and Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008), has been awarded Sweden's Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which is named after the Swedish creator of Pippi Longstocking. The prize amounts to 773,224 U.S. dollars, making it the world's richest for the genre.
Last month, Tan has also won an Oscar for his short film adaptation of one of those tales, The Lost Thing.
Tan said the latest award is an unexpected bonus.
He was cleaning his Melbourne home when he received the call late on Tuesday night from the Swedish judges. "It seems unbelievable," Tan told the Herald Sun on Tuesday night. "There were 170 nominees, including authors I grew up reading; it is remarkable to be nominated, let alone win."
The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award is presented annually to honor an outstanding author, illustrator or oral storyteller in children's and young adults' literature.
Astrid Lindgren award jury praised Tan as a "masterly visual storyteller, pointing the way ahead to new possibilities for picture books."
"Shaun Tan sees every book as an experiment in visual and verbal storytelling," his award citation read.
"Tan has reinvented the picture book by creating visually spectacular pictorial narratives with a constant human presence."
"His pictorial worlds constitute a separate universe where nothing is self-evident and anything is possible."
Tan will fly to Sweden to receive the prize on May 31.
In 2008, Australian author Sonya Hartnett also won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.