Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver in 1974 to Malaysian-Chinese immigrants. She attended Simon Fraser University, as well as the University of British Columbia, where she graduated with an MFA in creative writing. She is the former editor of Ricepaper magazine. In 2001 she was awarded the Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award for most promising writer under 30. 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.