Photo: Cecilia Heisser / NationalmuseumPippi Longstocking and the water buffalo
Before Shaun Tan visited Stockholm in 2011 to receive the award, he created an illustration depicting Pippi Longstocking riding a water buffalo. During his visit, Tan chose to donate the illustration to the Nationalmuseum as a gift to Sweden.
In the illustration Shaun Tan’s and Astrid Lindgren’s characters meet. Using pencil and crayon Shaun Tan let Astrid Lindgren's most famous figure Pippi Longstocking sit at the head of a water buffalo. The water buffalo as a motif is included in the short story The Water Buffalo in the anthology Tales from Outer Suburbia (Allen & Unwin, 2008).
Shaun Tan made the illustration for his visit to Stockholm in late May this year, and it was presented for the first time in his award lecture at Kulturhuset in Stockholm. Shaun Tan chose to donate the illustration to the Nationalmuseum as a gift to Sweden.
– The Nationalmuseum is very delighted to receive an original work of this year's Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award recipient Shaun Tan. He appears here as a great innovator of a classical pictorial world in children's book form. The acquisition of Shaun Tan's illustration is therefore a valuable complement to the museum's collections of children's book illustrations, said Magnus Olausson, Director of Collections and the Swedish Portrait Gallery at the Nationalmuseum upon receiving the donation.
A masterly visual storyteller
Shaun Tan is an Australian illustrator, known for his ability to create visually spectacular pictorial narratives with a constant human presence. His most critically acclaimed book, The Arrival, is a complex, completely wordless graphic novel about an immigrant family. Shaun Tan breaks down the boundaries of storytelling, taking us to a place beyond conventions and literary hierarchies.
Discover Shaun Tan