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. Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and an Edward Stanford Priz Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. and Australia, and have been translated into 25 languages.
Her books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. Restrained, courageous and profound, Thien’s novel – now Booker longlisted – bears witness to a period the true history of which remains contested.Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. Language and music become a means of transcending ideology: the novel’s title – a line from The Internationale sung defiantly by the students of Tiananmen – also gestures eloquently to the inexpressible loss of the generations “forged and reformed” by the revolutionary years. Thien’s writing has a symphonic quality: motifs – memory, inheritance, love, loyalty – repeat and intertwine, crescendoing to the events of 1989.
Through Ai-ming, Marie painstakingly reconstructs a shared history: the friendship of their fathers, prodigiously talented musicians at the Shanghai Conservatory, and the fortunes of their families during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. I n Vancouver in 1990, a year after her father’s inexplicable suicide, Marie and her mother are visited by Ai-ming, a young woman fleeing China following the protests in Tiananmen Square.
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