Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and four novels: Certainty (2006), Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) and The Book of Records (2025), named one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2025. Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, among other honours. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages, and her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. As a librettist, she created Chinatown, a full-length opera by Alice Ping Yee Ho and Paul Yee, and collaborates on a range of chamber works. In 2024, she received the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, honouring a writer in mid-career. Born in Vancouver, Madeleine lives in Montreal and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College at The City University of New York.