The Great Big Read

The Great Big Read for this half-term will be held this week. Students from Y7-Y11 will be listening to an instalment of the short story, Mr. Katayama by Shaun Tan at the beginning of each lesson on that day. This short story comes from a book written and illustrated by Shaun Tan called Tales from the Inner City. The stories deal with the environmental impact on the planet.

‘Shaun Tan has been watching as the owls and possums in Melbourne’s suburbs have become more brazen and feels troubled by it. 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. 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?’