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), about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s, and about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. Her books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and have been translated into 25 languages. A new novel, The Book of Records, set in a building made of time, is forthcoming in 2025.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the 2016 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction and an Edward Stanford Prize, among other honours. The novel was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize 2017, longlisted for a Carnegie Medal, and named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2016.