Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001), and three novels, Certainty (2006); Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), shortlisted for Berlin’s International Literature Prize and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Liberaturpreis; and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016). Her books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and have been translated into 25 languages. 

Her short fiction appears inThe New Anthology of Canadian Literature, The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, The Broadview Introduction to Literature, Literature: A Pocket Anthology and elsewhere. Her work has been awarded the City of Vancouver Book Award, Amazon First Novel Award, a Canadian Authors Association Award, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and The Ovid Festival Prize, and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, and The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.

Her literary criticism, essays, and multimedia work, on topics as diverse as music and human rights, personhood, female beauty, state surveillance, visual art, race, literary politics, neighbourhoods, and the Québec rodeo are widely available, including in The Guardian, Granta, Financial Times, PEN America, Five Dials, Brick, Warscapes, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, National Post, Globe & Mail, Literary Review of Canada and the Asia Literary Review.

She has taught literature and fiction in Canada, China, Germany, Nigeria, the United States, Zimbabwe, Singapore, and Japan. With novelists Tsitsi Dangaremba and Ignatius Mabasa, she co-edited A Family Portrait, new fiction from Zimbabwe. Since 2010, she has been part of the international faculty in the MFA program at City University of Hong Kong. Along with novelist and photographer Rawi Hage, she was the inaugural Shadbolt Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University, which supported the publication and presentation of their new artistic work, Arrival.

Her new book, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s, and about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, is forthcoming in 2016.