He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated short film adaptation of the 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated.

In 2006, his wordless graphic novel The Arrival won the Book of the Year prize as part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.

[4] Tan's work has been described as an "Australian vernacular" that is "at once banal and uncanny, familiar and strange, local and universal, reassuring and scary, intimate and remote, guttersnipe and sprezzatura.

Of his effort at writing as a youth, Tan tells, "I have a small pile of rejection letters as testament to this ambition!

[10] Tan almost studied to become a geneticist, and enjoyed chemistry, physics, history and English while in high school as well as art and claimed that he did not really know what he wanted to do.

[11] Tan continued his education at the University of Western Australia where he studied Fine Arts, English Literature and History.

He feels he is "like a translator" of ideas, and is happy and flattered to see his work adapted and interpreted in film and music (such as by the Australian Chamber Orchestra).

The Shaun Tan Award for Young Artists is sponsored by the City of Subiaco and open to all Perth school children between 5 and 17 years.