Artist, writer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Shaun Tan wishes he had a single lightning flash origin story for the inspiration behind his new hardback graphic novel Hometown.

Instead, the Hillarys-raised, Melbourne-based creator of The Arrival and Tales From Outer Suburbia took an eight-year journey to complete his latest fictional work about a girl whose sense of belonging, identity and family is rocked by an unexpected visitor — a boy.

It is a similar theme circled in his previous books, which explore the ideas of losing home, finding home or questioning what home is, but this time it has a new twist.

“I don’t think I’ve ever written a story where there is only one human character surrounded by a non-human community,” 52-year-old Tan shares.

“I’ve done a lot of stories the other way around with a strange visitor, whether it’s a lost deep-sea diver or a creature washed up on a beach, or a foreign exchange student, or an immigrant, where you’ve got this person who’s arrived in a strange place and they’re having to navigate and make sense of it.

“I thought, ‘well, wouldn’t it be interesting if it was the other way round?’ If there was a person who’s grown up in a really weird place, but for them it’s all normal, and to then be suddenly told they’re a human, that they don’t come from there, and need to come to the place where they ‘belong’.

“I also had this thought experiment of what would happen if one day somebody knocked on your door and you opened the door, and there was a person who looked like a clone of yourself, who’s urgently saying ‘You’ve got to come, Shaun. You’ve got to come with me. This isn’t your home’. . . I think that’s a fascinating science fiction idea and set-up for the whole story.”

This narrative might be sounding familiar to audiences of Spare Parts Puppet Theatre’s January 2025 season of puppet musical Hometown, based on a 20-page comic and more simplified form of the story Tan made for a UK-published anthology about halfway through his eight-year artistic marathon.

It continued his long association with Spare Parts, including production Rules Of Summer, where Tan initially anticipated his longer-form Hometown publication would be finished around the same time the puppetry stage adaptation of Hometown would be presented.

“They were able to get it off the ground quicker than me,” Tan says, who won his best animated short film Oscar in 2011 for The Lost Thing.

“I’m very slow. I change my mind, and there’s a lot of other projects going on simultaneously. The interesting thing about that is they were working with an earlier version, and I had more detailed drawings, but I didn’t really want to influence their direction. I wanted them to develop their own vision independently, and so we kind of worked in parallel.

“Their show ended up being aesthetically quite different to mine, which is great. It was also a wonderful litmus test for the dilemma she faces in the story because different audience members had different reactions to the way it ended.”

Working from his small ramshackle home studio and a bigger, more ramshackle rented space that enables larger paintings and messier creativity, Tan’s highly detailed and absorbing Hometown illustrations have an array of influences, from Inuit and Haida Indigenous cultures of North America to the magnification of intricate patterns in his everyday surroundings, including insects, tiny plants and nuts.

“I think we sleepwalk through most of our lives, so we don’t notice this stuff,” explains Tan, who worked in watercolour, coloured pencil, and ink pens on paper.

“There’s this picture in the book that I really like, where she’s on this very strange public transport with a whole bunch of weird creatures. I imagine they’re coming home from school, just the way I used to on the 442 bus from Warwick bus station to Hillarys, bored and looking out the window while thinking about my place in the world. That’s her every day and we’re looking at the picture thinking ‘that doesn’t look tedious, that looks exciting’.”

Similar could be said by anyone looking from the outside at Tan’s career that took him from the University of WA to numerous literary awards, but to his children Vida and Joel with artist wife Inari Kiuru, he is just a “big dork” of a dad.

“They’ve grown up with that, and they find it interesting, but they have a good perspective on it, in the sense that it is just another job, like a tradie who works with words and pictures,” he muses.

“It’s nothing special, which is how I view it as well. It’s just a job that’s uncommon, that’s all.”

Hometown is released on September 29, $35, published by Allen & Unwin.