Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award

Presented in Stockholm, 2011, a live lecture traditionally given by winners of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, an international children's literary award established by the Swedish government in 2002 to honour the Swedish children's author Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002). The Lindgren Award annually recognises one or more living people and extant institutions (twelve in the first ten years) - people for their career contributions and institutions for their long-term sustainable work. Specifically they should be "authors, illustrators, oral storytellers and promoters of reading" whose "work is of the highest quality, and in the spirit of Astrid Lindgren."[4] The object of the award is to increase interest in children’s and young people's literature, and to promote children's rights to culture on a global level.

What a rare and wonderful privilege it is to be here in Stockholm for many reasons. Firstly, simply to visit a beautiful city in a beautiful country. Secondly, to receive such a tremendously generous prize from a nation that so highly values its literature for young people, with equal quantities of passion and studious criticism. And thirdly, the opportunity to speak to an audience who truly care about these things; imagination, art, literature, life, children’s rights and Pippi Longstocking.

The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award is a blessing not just for me personally at this point in my career, but for a vast international community of creators and readers. It’s a celebration of the hard work, commitment and passion of all writers, illustrators and the organizations that support a shared aspiration. It’s an affirmation that literature for young people enriches the culture around it, enlightens and educates, and also unashamedly entertains: that our love for children’s books is, in and of itself, deserving of an honourable celebration. There are many bad things in our world, a place of ambivalence, doubt and conflict, but here at least is one thing that we can all agree is unequivocally positive: good books for young readers.

Of course, the Alma is also a kind of critical inquiry – it asks us all to reflect upon questions of meaning and value. Were Astrid Lindgren with us today in person as much as in spirit, I imagine she would be quick to agree that celebration and criticism are two sides of the same coin. She might say that one of life’s greatest pleasures is a difficult thought, and that there is an immense, consoling joy to be found in asking hard questions about ordinary things. Pippi Longstocking, of course, knows this intuitively: ruffling feathers and trampling over assumptions, because sometimes that’s the best way to know what is important and worth cherishing.

The hard question here is why I happen to have been chosen as this year’s recipient, something I’m sure the jury has debated for some time, and few can envy such an complicated and challenging task. On behalf of all the nominees, I’m very grateful for their time and patience, their expertise and commitment. For all of us it’s incredibly heartening to know that our work has been regarded with such seriousness and respect, and I hope a great deal of skepticism and critcism as well: examined, pulled apart, interrogated, and then put back together under a very bright light.

To know that my own assortment of odds and ends is still standing upright at the end of this process, maybe even a little taller than before, is as good a review as any artist can hope for. When I’m alone and working in the middle of the night, as if marooned on an island, I’m always worrying whether my work will be strong enough to float, like a message in a bottle, and able to travel any distance at all from my desk. Can other people make sense of my own strange obsessions, these words and images that I find so inexplicably fascinating? Can a story move beyond my own private imagination, pass across oceans of language and culture, be understood by adults and children alike, perhaps even those living in distant places I have never visited?

These are the thoughts that every writer and artist must ponder occasionally, if not all the time. It boils down to a singular question, one that draws all of us to this wonderful, rambling world of literature, and one that runs so parallel to ordinary life: ‘do others see and feel the same things that I see and feel?’

Well, standing here before you today, I can only guess that you probably do! Which is really quite amazing, this strange, connective power of writing and illustration.

To be presenting a speech like this seems as far removed as possible from the quiet confinement of my studio in suburban Melbourne, insulated by books, art materials and silence, where every thought happens in a merciful solitude, far from scrutiny, which is just as well because I’m sometimes still wearing pyjamas in the middle of the day. I’m basically an introverted and uncertain person, my mind is a jumble of vague thoughts that I’m constantly sifting for grains of reliable truth, things that seem honest and real.

Drawing and writing have always been helpful here. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, my scribbling coalesces into an interesting painting or story. Occasionally these are published and they become suddenly public, when they might be received with a frown, a laugh, or a quiet nod of assent, as if to say ‘yes, I see and feel something like that too.’ Joy, sorrow, fear, pleasure, and every shade of mystery in between.

I now find myself in the unusual position of traveling thousands of miles to an exotic country – not unlike the characters in so many of my stories – and asked to speak to a large room full of people, the very opposite of my day-to-day life, and a very good reason for wearing something other than pyjamas! But perhaps, in honour of Pippi, I’ll still keep wearing slightly mismatched socks.

Of course, it’s rare to be asked to talk about one’s self for much longer than would normally be considered polite. But it the true spirit of Ms Longstocking, I’m not one to miss an opportunity to reflect upon what I’ve been doing and where I come from. From this distance in the far north of the planet, I too can look toward the south seas and realise that my evolution as an artist is quite a strange story, perhaps as strange as any I’ve imagined in my books, although I never considered it terribly interesting while it was happening, being too worried about paying the rent and, like most artists, trying to justify the pursuit of such an uncertain career.

 I come from Perth; one of the most isolated cities in the world, straddling the periphery of the Indian Ocean and a vast inland desert, and over 2,000 kilometers from the next major city – further than the distance from the top to the bottom of Sweden. I grew up in the coastal suburb of Hillarys, which is now a place of shopping malls, highways and tourist beaches, surrounded by a brick and tile mosaic of freshly minted suburban houses. In my childhood, however, Hillarys was a somewhat empty and anonymous place, a peripheral suburb in a peripheral city, like a cartographer’s afterthought, something to fill the space between a map and the edge of the world.

This was my homeland: affordable blocks of land that had been carved from ancient sand dunes and forests by big yellow bulldozers: neat, level squares of opportunity left baking in the fierce heat of summer, waiting for young middle-class families to fill them with dreams of peace and prosperity. We were one such family: my parents, my older brother and I.

My father is Malaysian Chinese, his parents from China. My mother is a third generation Australian of English and Irish ancestry. My own name includes all of these elements: an Irish first name with an English spelling – Shaun – followed by a Malaysian version of a Chinese surname – Tan.

Many people naturally ask me how this mixed heritage has influenced the themes of my work as an artist, particularly as I often deal with subjects such as immigration, cultural difference and problems of language. Of course, a book like The Arrival, a wordless story of a man traveling to an imaginary country, was initially inspired by anecdotes from my own family, including the experiences of my wife who is from Finland (my other significant Scandinavian connection!) All of my family actually appear as characters in my book.

I drew myself as the main protagonist in The Arrival, and although I’ve never left my home country, I still have a sense of being a little displaced. In fact, many of us are ‘displaced people’ if we look back far enough. The history of humanity is a history of migration, change and adaptation.

Growing up in Perth only seemed to make this more obvious. I often wondered about my family’s spiritual relationship, if such a thing existed, to this semi-arid patch of coast. Being half-Chinese in a very Anglo-Australian neighbourhood may have compounded this;

I was constantly aware of looking different, of not entirely fitting in, perhaps even more so than most children, very sensitive to occasional anti-Asian racism directed at my brother, my father and I, something that used to especially enrage my mother. There was a sense of both belonging and not belonging: it’s a strange thing to be constantly asked ‘where are you from?’ in the place you were born. Over time I began to realise that a clear identity or connection to a place is perhaps not something natural or innate. Sometimes you have to invent it, much like writing a good story or drawing a picture.

My parents set a good example by designing and building their own house, a process which lasted much of my early childhood: the smell of wet cement and angle grinders, lifted on the breeze from the Indian Ocean, still conjure vivid memories of a building-site playground. They were growing something out of nearly nothing, brick by brick, far from their own parents, and far from the source of their own culture. Europe and Asia were utterly abstract concepts for us kids, just words and pictures in books.

The only signs that any previous empire existed were huge, wild-looking insects and woolly caterpillars that visited our new place from the dark frontier of surrounding bush-land, objects of endless fascination and delight for us boys, as they were technically our first house pets. These disappeared over time, along with the bush, and the huge orange-and-white banksia flowers you could hold with two hands, like giant hand-knitted fruits. It was illegal to pick these native blossoms, so we rarely braved it. Then one day all the banksia trees were cut down and burnt to make room for new houses: the nearby hillside glowed red in the night, we walked past the smouldering wreckage for weeks, kicking up plumes of ash on our way home from school. This was but one example of the strange, confusing world of adults, with their arbitrary rules of protection and destruction.

In many ways, Hillarys was a microcosm of Australia as a whole, a land of displaced lives, of worlds both imported, transplanted and re-built from scratch. At the same time, Australia is a country with a troubled conscience. It’s still coming to terms with a dark history: the unjust theft of land from its indigenous people, and the decimation of a fragile environment by two centuries of European agriculture and industry: Australia boasts the dubious title of having the highest rate of extinction in the world.

This background inevitably finds its way into my illustrations in The Rabbits, a fable about strange creatures who destroy a country that is not their own; and a collection of short stories, Tales from Outer Suburbia – an ode to my homeland – where silent creatures haunt the streets like guilty shadows, and giant machines roll through quiet, dormitory neighborhoods, among so many other things that are never fully understood.

Here are the strange antipodean suburbs that I’ve grown to simultaneously love and distrust, to celebrate and criticise. Above all else, I’m fascinated by the ambiguity of it all. Not so much a moral ambiguity, but something even more fundamental, a conceptual weirdness. It’s a landscape that has changed faster than it can think or remember, a post-industrial science fiction story that, like much of the modern world, is still being written.

I think children understand the ambiguity of everyday reality better than anyone. They very sensitive to it, seeing it all fresh and for the first time, in all its strangeness. Children are still trying to figure out the inconsistencies that many adults have filed in the deeper recesses on our minds and hearts, locked up in a subconscious cabinet, being too busy dealing with more pressing, practical problems. How many of us as children noticed something baffling, and launched into an endless line of questioning, one ‘why?’ following another, until a weary parent said ‘I don’t know’ or ‘that’s just how it is’ or ‘stop asking so many silly questions!’

Imagine an enormous red creature discovered on the shore of a city, which everyone sees, but nobody pays attention to. Covered with hinged doors, sporting claws, bells and tentacles without any apparent purpose, it takes a younger person to be curious enough to raise a question that nobody dare ask, ‘where does it belong?’ The answer is likely to be far too complicated, the implications too challenging: an unwelcome disruption to day-to-day business. In this particular story, that question is never fully answered, but perhaps that’s the point of fiction. Answers are always not so important, at least not as important as good questions.

The title of this story The Lost Thing might refer to either the strange creature we see in the illustrations, or something more abstract in the heart of the narrator, his own imagination or soul. Once again, I’ve represented myself as the central character, because in some ways it’s an autobiographical story. It was the first picture book I both wrote and illustrated at the age of 25, a time when I was accepting more adult responsibilities, worrying about making a living as an artist, and feeling some nostalgia for the curiosity, playfulness and sideways wisdom of my childhood.

The story is essentially self-critical – a warning against my own complacency, my tendency to ignore the things that are most important. My counterpart in the story laments that he doesn’t notice ‘lost things’ anymore because he’s ‘too busy doing other stuff’, which really has a lot to do with my own preoccupations, often quite self-centered and short-sighted. The narrator recedes into the darkness, lost among the commuters on their way home from work.

Of course, as Astrid Lindgren would say, such act of criticism is inherently optimistic. Such stories open the possibility of grafting childhood curiosity back into an adult consciousness, as much as it encourages young readers to hold on to those things that fascinate them, and never let them go.

Indeed, writing and drawing in a sketchbook is quite therapeutic for me: there’s a feeling of wholeness that comes from rummaging through all the disjointed rooms of my childhood, youth and adulthood, looking for ideas, a mix of dreaming and remembering. Drawing for me is a single continuous project that’s been in progress since I could first hold a crayon.

Today, lines and words dangle on the pages of my sketchbooks, the tip of a pencil able to hook submerged memories and impressions from very long ago, things which are otherwise inaccessible to the more conscious, purposeful parts of my mind. I try not to worry about what my drawings actually mean, I just follow them where they go. Meaning, significance, good sense, order, logic, appropriateness: all such things can be indefinitely postponed when I draw – what a relief!

After years of academic study and practical training, I’ve come full circle in respecting the intuitions of childhood. For all its awkwardness, there is something utterly sincere and profound about that early creative impulse, a natural animal instinct. Some of the most beautiful paintings in the world are not found in the secular temple of an art gallery, but pinned by magnets to that other sacred site of the art world, the fridge door. Here you will see the purest acts of casual expression, true artists immersed in act of making, free of self-consciousness or pretension (and, mercifully, also free of art dealers and critics!)

A child’s imagination is a laboratory where anything goes; an endless thread of ‘what if’ conjectures, constantly tested against reality for some kind of fit. Assumptions are derailed and common sense disobeyed. In other words, a child’s imagination has all the virtues that one is chasing as an adult artist. ‘Every child is an artist,’ wrote Picasso, ‘The problem is how to remain an artist once they grow up.’

I’ve been very fortunate to find myself stumbling into the world of children’s books as a freelance illustrator, and therefore in a creative environment where children are present, to remind me how to look and see. It’s a mistake to believe that childhood is just a series of educational stepping stones, something to be experienced and left behind as we graduate into adulthood. It’s more like a bag of things you take on a long journey, always being careful not to forget where you put them. My own fondest memories of childhood all involve making something, as my parents did, out of nearly nothing. My mother, an amateur artist, once meticulously copied a scene from Disney’s The Jungle Book onto a bedroom wall using colours she kept in jam jars. I was three years old and remember seeing this enormous, grinning snake appear, bit by bit: an early introduction to the magic of art. My brother and I soon discovered that we too could transform cheap runny paints and butcher’s paper into birds, elephants, dinosaurs and erupting volcanoes, as present in our minds as anything outside of them.

I suppose this is one of the positive things about growing up where I did: a feeling of undefined possibility, of living in a wide open space without apparent history. My childhood felt like an unmeasured century that needed to be filled by small creative acts, if only to keep boredom at bay. Drawing a flower and putting cheap perfume in the middle of it; building primeval figures out of clay and sticks, making planets from paper and glue wrapped around an inflated balloon. Just as the yellow bulldozers constantly erased the landscape of our suburb to a bed of pale sand, kindergarten easels were set up every day like a row of tabula rasa, blank slates, inviting tiny hands to conjure something new into existence, to fill the emptiness.

One of my first drawings features two birds watching an egg in a nest, waiting for it to hatch. This still hangs in my parent’s bedroom not far from another thing I drew at the age of five: a dinosaur father and dinosaur mother, with an unborn infant curled up in her belly. It’s interesting now to look at them, and see recurring themes of genesis and birth, something very young children are naturally interested in, given that from their point of view the universe has not been around for very long. It’s interesting also to see how such early ideas are connected with many of my current artistic preoccupations; recurring images of eggs, sprouting trees, regenerating landscapes and unidentified animals, strangers arriving on distant shores and vulnerable creatures adopted by caring children.

I like looking at my earliest drawings because that remind me of a time beforeanything mattered very much. Certainly, I had a talent for visualizing objects, although I think ‘talent’ is often misunderstood as an innate skill. It’s really more of an excitement, a special interest or attraction – the skill is just something that tries to keep up, the watering-can you reach for when you think about a garden. For me that enthusiasm has to do with grasping the ‘flavour’ of a thing, often a fleeting impression that exists behind the curtain of language. It’s wanting to know more about the tree-ness of a tree, the bird-ness of a bird or the house-ness of a house; to not be fooled by the simplicity of words.

What are these things really? What is their essence? It’s such an enticing mystery, and whenever I go out sketching, I’m invariably returning to the same starting point, drawing as a toddler, a child, a teenager, a young adult. It’s always the same, elusive mystery of existence. Meanings drawn tight from years of experience as an adult are pulled open to reveal what was always enigmatic: a ‘tree’, a ‘bird’, a ‘house’ and many more things with arbitrary, strange-sounding names.

Of course, it’s very easy to frame an artist’s development as somehow following a very purposeful trajectory, preordained and deeply philosophical. How far from the truth! I grew up in an environment of middle-class pop culture, about as far from the artistic centre of the world as you can get while still having access to fast food.

Suburban Western Australia in the 1980s: a land of discount supermarkets, television, advertising, regrettable fashions and embarrassing fads imported second-hand from the United States, a country we wrongly believed knew what they were doing. Like most kids, I did not really know about ‘art’ and ‘literature’ in terms of a hierarchy of quality; everything seemed tuned to the same buzzing frequency, radio signals from anywhere that was not here. It was actually unimaginable that something profound might come from our tiny castaway world of home, school and football.

My artistic diet included drive-in movies, videos and computer games and other electronically reproduced chaos, a precursor to the contemporary screen culture so seamlessly embraced by young people today. Naturally, my favourite subjects were robots, monsters, spaceships and disasters, and I drew these constantly.

It’s easy to be disparaging about this now, to focus instead on my experiences of fine art and classic literature, which I also enjoyed as part of an eclectic mix. But the truth is that my life as an artist emerged from popular culture. Not because it was good or bad, but because there were some glimmers of beauty and brilliance buried in all that white noise, some interesting bits of nutrition beneath the sugar and popcorn. I just had to look critically, without even knowing what that meant. I did this by drawing the things I liked, quiet moments of meditation in which to decide the difference between good and bad.

I would often draw after coming home from a movie, using felt-tip pens on the back of old architectural plans that my Dad had set aside for me; luxuriously large pieces of paper for a child. Movie posters were quite expensive, so I was effectively creating cheap alternatives for my bedroom – and also ‘improving’ some of scenes and objects according to my own directorial tastes. The monster might be even better with two heads, the spaceships much longer, the hero far less confident against the giant caterpillar of my own backyard. Now that I occasionally work as a film concept designer, it’s interesting to see how these childhood scribblings might be added to my resume – who would have guessed that it was all professional development!

I realise that my own book and short film, The Lost Thing, was subconsciously fed by the popular images of my childhood, from Star Wars to ET, and in turn may inspire a new generation of children. I have a little folder of ‘lost things’ sent to me by children of all ages – drawings of creatures made of suburban junk –  with, of course, each child’s personal modifications and improvements. Inadvertently, they are critically interpreting my work, and also thinking about the hidden spirit locked within banal, confusing details of modern life. They are making sense of junk: in creating these ‘lost things’ perhaps finding deeper meanings from an otherwise shallow and commercially saturated environment.

We must accept that children today are confronted by a confusing mix of reality and processed reality; this is what we have to live with. It’s not necessarily bad. Personal creativity can allow us to make sense of it: drawing, writing, looking and reading within a thoughtful, attentive space. This is how we can catch our breath, collect our thoughts, test our ideas and inevitably figure out who we are in the process. This is how we create our own personal map of the world.

And this is also why literature is so important. The best books were for me like a condensed organization of ideas, a calm bay of interpretation in a world of noise. Reading seemed a lot like drawing and writing; like my illustrations on old architectural plans, it was a self-mediated experience. More importantly perhaps, a self-owned experience, something that is incredibly important to children, who often live in a world where they are told what to do and think, either directly or by implication. Books offer the freedom to make up our own minds, the best stories being not at all instructive or moralizing, but rather asking very well crafted questions in an entertaining way, inspiring further creative thought. 

In fact, I often think of a good story, whether written, illustrated, filmed or spoken, as really being a beautiful question. The most beautiful questions are actually a little unsettling, because at their best they have no simple answer.

My first experiences of this, as I imagine is the case for most of us, were the stories my mother read to my brother and I at bedtime. Literature had not been a big part of my mother’s life, having grown up herself in a household of with few books, enduring a factory-like education that regarded literacy as a tool for work, in an environment where creativity was considered an idle distraction. Perhaps because of this, she was adamant that my brother and I be exposed to a great range of books. Also because of this, our bedtime readings were quite random and unfiltered, whatever was on the public library shelf and looked okay.

The most memorable of all these selections was George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The fact of it being a children’s book seemed pretty obvious from the first page, and therefore appropriate for my brother and I, aged about seven and eight. We all knew as much about Soviet history as we did about the dark side of the moon; and had no idea what ‘satire’ meant (although I recall Mum looking it up in a dictionary at one point). In any case, that first page was the hook, and we all had to see it through to the end, revisiting the Manor Farm every evening, chapter by chapter, as it became progressively more corrupt and disturbing. Why did the pigs forget the rules that had so inspired all the animals to rebel? How were the sheep so easily brainwashed? Who had written on the wall that ‘all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’? Why was Boxer, the heroic horse, carted off to a glue-factory instead of a hospital?

Naturally, this left a big impression on me, and might explain something about the subjects that emerge, decades later, in my own illustrated stories: gun-toting rabbits, dogs that know how to burn down a house, blind reindeer and sinister bureaucracies. Dark animal fables aside, the thing I appreciated most about this accidental bed-time story was how problematic it was. It had us all thinking long after the final disturbing image of pigs pretending to be men. That was profoundly entertaining and moving; upsetting, but in a positive way.

It was also weirdly true: in the school playground, I certainly had some sense of what behaviour was pig-like, chicken-like, bovine and ovine. I also sensed that these things were far more complicated than categories of good and bad, being well-behaved or badly-behaved, and I remember we talked about this with Mum and Dad a lot. Character, motivation and circumstance – these seemed to be hard questions. Orwell was not like schoolwork, it would be impossible to score 100% if you were asked what it all meant.

The same is true of all the illustrated books that impressed me the most as a child, and which continue to do so as an adult. Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are which refuses to explain itself; Chris van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick full of narrative enigma;

and a set of humorous poems written by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Arnold Lobel, The Headless Horsemen Rides Tonight featuring zombies, ghouls and ghosts, going about their compulsive, sordid business without any hint of moral redemption. I borrowed such books from the library so often that I might as well have owned them. What they all had in common was a kind of simple confession that life is strange and funny, friendly and scary, and that meaning is something you have to find yourself, it can’t be delivered like a sermon or a vaccination. It’s as if the author is quietly saying to you, ‘what do you make of this?’ and then leaving you to your own devices.

Our Mum read us many other stories which were very resolved and morally instructive, and which I now barely remember: kids doing bad things, and facing the consequences, or bravely taking responsibility. Perhaps these had some educational value, but they were as forgettable as they were didactic (and, dare I say, often implausible!). It’s worth recalling here something Philip Pullman said in his own speech here a few years ago; ‘Children choose to read stories that please them, not stories that are ethically instructive. The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all.’

My short fable ‘The Water Buffalo’ is very much about this, without realizing it. In fact, most of my work is unconsciously self-reflexive: my characters are often seen looking, drawing, reading and writing, but rarely speaking (many of them do not even have mouths). In this case, I just loved the idea of a big, silent buffalo that lives in an empty suburban lot, similar to one I used to walk past every day on my way to the supermarket. When asked for advice, the buffalo points in a particular direction, but he never says what he is pointing at.

This is a kind of a metaphor for the work of an artist or writer. A good creative idea is little more than a hunch, an intuition that something meaningful is out there, over in the darkness beyond the houses, trees and power-lines. It can’t be spoken of directly: explanation or advice won’t work here. For an idea to really weave itself into the fabric of your memory, it must be experienced first-hand: you have to find your own resolution. This is what good literature offers the reader, and especially the young reader, encountering so much of this world for the first time, and children will happily respond to anything that respects their own insight, without telling them what to think.

As for the buffalo – the artist in a vacant lot – perhaps he knows what he was pointing at, and perhaps he doesn’t. Sometimes it’s enough to just tell a child to look carefully: the rest will take care of itself. As Pippi Longstocking herself put it with such matter-of-fact eloquence: ‘I’m a Thing-Finder… The world is full of things, and somebody has to look for them. And that’s just what a Thing-Finder does.’ I’m sure she would be great friends with the water buffalo, as much as a monkey and horse, and seeing something of her own pigtails in his knowing, sideways horns.

Artists, writers and readers are all thing-finders: we have a feeling about a truthful direction, but don’t insist on a particular message. The surrealism of my stories and pictures is partly a confession of ignorance, an acknowledgement that life is weird and mostly undiscovered. It’s okay to be uncertain, puzzled and not have all the answers.

The other great confession of literature, and one that I’ve actually found very comforting, is that life is hard. As much as it is joyful, wonderful and astounding, it can often be depressing – people suffer, irrational things happen, fairness is far from guaranteed and disappointment is commonplace. Just admitting this openly can be immensely consoling, especially for a child, given that childhood is so emotionally tumultuous – there’s a kind of relief to be found in an honest, safe and thoughtful examination of weakness, failure and fear. Here again, art and literature cast a very open eye over that basic human question: ‘do others see and feel what I see and feel?’ Just asking that question ensures we are never alone, and to talk about disturbing things is inherently optimistic.

For this reason I’ve often found it difficult to sympathise with those who consider some of my books to be ‘inappropriate’ or ‘too dark’. The Red Tree is the most interesting example. It’s a story without any specific narrative, plot or characterization; no particular moral message, no continuity, and no clear theme, except that it’s more or less about depression. All of these qualities seemed to me, oddly enough, perfectly suited to a picture book, even though they run counter to so many familiar picture book conventions. And indeed, getting an original concept published has been a challenging part of my job, given that children’s publishing can be quite conservative by nature

That said, I’ve been very fortunate to work with great editors, who are very considerate of my experimental ideas. In this case I explained that the concept for The Red Tree was partly inspired by children’s artwork, which often involves quite abstract ‘emotional landscapes’: monsters, houses, storms, animals and plants can be seen as specific metaphors for very general feelings. This seemed to be an ideal way to approach emotional subjects I had been trying to represent for some time: depression, loneliness, anxiety and sadness – things that might find their best expression in images rather than words.

Upon publication, the book evoked mixed reactions; some people claiming it was wonderfully life-affirming, others that it was just plain depressing and inappropriate for children. It’s not my duty to answer any of these opinions, because a book is it’s own object; autonomous and free-roaming. But I do find reader’s reactions fascinating, perhaps because my own images ‘say’ very little, inviting personal interpretation from others.  

On one page enormous fish – possibly dead, its clouded eye weeping black fluid, its mouth hanging agape – drifts weightlessly between the buildings of a street, casting a shadow over a downcast, red-headed girl. In the gutter, there is a tiny red leaf, which can actually be found in every picture of The Red Tree, following this sad-looking girl from page to page.

The most interesting thing is that children are the first to notice the leaf, and intuitively understand that it is important, without naming its value. It just exists, and they can find it. They rarely ask about ‘meaning’, and prefer to improvise their own narrative. Adults, on the other hand, can take a little longer to notice the leaf, and many never do – especially those who believe the story to be dark and depressing. These are the same people who ask me about conceptual motivation, artistic references and, perhaps most annoyingly, ‘who is your intended audience?’ Well, I know who isn’t my intended audience! If a reader is so busy trying to deconstruct, analyse and categorise everything, there’s no time left to experience anything.

The good readers – children, naturally, and curious, open-minded adults – just look. They invariably recognize joy, hope and inspiration, as well as their dark counterparts, grief, depression, fear and loneliness; but they also don’t want to diminish their personal reading by applying such convenient labels. They prefer the gentle mystery of it, and how that mystery occupies so much of our experience in the real world, a place of darkness and light, a place we must constantly negotiate, internally as much as externally. A good reader knows that imagination is more important than knowledge and understanding.

I myself never really know what my own paintings and stories mean – in fact, that’s how I know if they are any good! The question of meaning must remain open, carefully passed to the reader intact, like a delicate object preserved in a jar. I go to a great deal of trouble to avoid specific interpretations of my work, and over the years I’ve shied away from symbolism, allegory and coded references, aspiring toward something more universal, something equally appreciated by both children and adults, the literate and illiterate, and ideally people of different cultural backgrounds, from Australia, all the way to Sweden.

I’m interested in characters who know little about their world, but do their best to make the most of what skills they have: the girl with a tree growing in her room, the tiny foreign exchange student with an unpronounceable name; the couple who must face absurd challenges in a faraway desert before they can be married; a family who discover another country in a secret room of their house; an immigrant who enters a new world of strange buildings and animals, unreadable language and customs.

Each of these characters represent the reader, and we are invited to walk in their shoes as they deal with problems not much stranger than our own. Like us, they live in a place where language and wisdom can only take you so far, the rest must be imagined and re-learned, as if you are once again a child.

If my work has a collective theme, it’s something like this: ‘reality is just another strange story’. It’s something we constantly narrate to ourselves through this peculiar invention of language and pictures; a project that begins in childhood and never really ends. Great books become part of our own map of experience: through reading we grasp the power and unity of our own thought and feeling. We are invited to empathise with others, to see the world from alternative angles, to wonder what it would be like to live differently, and to not feel alone when we constantly ask: ‘what if?’

As Astrid Lindgren herself wisely observed, ‘Everything of any consequence that has happened in the world happened first in someone’s imagination.’ That’s a profound thought, and perhaps the source of all hope for the future, especially when we think about the challenges awaiting for those who are only now learning to look and read. Let’s hope they can imagine a world in which possibility overrides impossibility, enchantment replaces disenchantment, where a curious question is more important than dogma and complacency. And, much like Pippi herself, to loudly protest against all those who would have us believe otherwise.