And as a person, he is unfailingly dry, and irreverent about his own successes in the way Australians can be. As a writer, he is a strange beast: dark, whimsical and deeply moving. Tan is perhaps most renowned as an artist, for the detailed pencil masterpieces seen in his wordless book The Arrival and his odd, bulbous inventions in The Lost Thing, the film adaptation of which won him an Academy award. I’d be suspicious if I claimed to know much about anything at all.” And in its own way, it is deep to realise how little we know. Now I realise how many philosophical questions there are that I have no answers for. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardianīut writing Tales has been good for him, he thinks, “because I feel a lot less certain than when I started. ‘I’d be suspicious if I claimed to know much about anything at all’ … Shaun Tan. Such as, what would we do if bears sued us for our crimes against the environment? What would we do if giant snails started performing slimy mating rituals all over our cities? What if the seas became so polluted that all the fish had to move into the sky?

For the last few years, he has been picking apart humanity’s complicated relationship with animals while writing and painting his book Tales from the Inner City, a beautiful and bleak anthology of stories, poems and artworks that pose unsettling questions about how we treat nonhuman life. Shaun Tan has been watching as the owls and possums in Melbourne’s suburbs have become more brazen, and feels troubled by it. “WE are the virus,” quickly became the most overrused meme of the pandemic. Sheep visited a locked-down Welsh McDonald’s. A herd of fallow deer peacefully grazed on a London housing estate. Schools of fish were suddenly visible in Venice’s cruise-ship-free waters. I n the days, weeks and months after the world went into lockdown, we marvelled as animals began to venture out into the habitats we had deserted.

The cicada shaun tan