Thien was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1974 to a Malaysian Chinese father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother. She studied contemporary dance at Simon Fraser University and earned a Master's degree in Fine Arts specializing in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.[3] Thien made the decision to switch from dance to creative writing for a few reasons, but mainly due to the fact that she felt inadequate in talent, despite her passion for the art.[4] Prior to working as an editor for the Rice Paper Magazine, she worked from an early age in clerical, retail and restaurant jobs. Thien was a finalist for Writers' Trust of Canada's RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 1999, and in 2001 she was awarded the Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop for her short story collection Simple Recipes.[5]
Career
Many of Thien's works focus on the theme of time in connection to place and human emotion. In an interview with Granta from 2016, she states that she is thinking about "the way that women’s lives are expressed in literature at this moment," and that she is interested in writing about nonwhite women and sexuality.[6]
Publications
In 2001, her first book titled Simple Recipes was published. The book is a collection of short fiction pieces exploring conflicts within intergenerational and, in two stories, intercultural relationships.[7] In the same year, Thien adapted artist Joe Chang's National Film Board short film, The Chinese Violin (2001), into a children's book. The story follows a young Chinese girl's journey as she and her musician father adjust to life in Vancouver.[8]
Thien's debut novel, Certainty (Toronto: M&S, 2006; New York: Little, Brown, 2007; London: Faber, 2007), follows a documentary producer as she searches for the truth about her father's experience living in Japanese-occupied Malaysia.[9] The novel has been published internationally and translated into 16 languages.[10]
Her second novel, Dogs at the Perimeter (Toronto: M&S, 2011; London: Granta Books, 2012), is about associates at Montreal's Brain Research Centre and their traumatic ties to the Cambodian genocide.[1] The novel has been translated into nine languages.
Her latest novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), follows the life of Li-Ling, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant, as she becomes the keeper of a mysterious work, the Book of Records, following her father's suicide. The story also focuses on her father and his friends’ lives as young musicians growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution.[11]
Madeleine Thien in Bonn, Germany, 2015, interviewed by Dietmar Kanthak
Academic
In 2008, Thien was invited to participate in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and the IWP State Department-funded 2010 study tour of the United States, which invited eight international writers, including Kei Miller, Eduardo Halfon, Billy Kahora and Khet Mar, to explore the unresolved legacies of American history. Her essay "The Grand Tour: In the Shadow of James Baldwin" concludes the 2015 essay collection, Fall and Rise, American Style: Eight International Writers Between Gettysburg and the Gulf.[12] The study tour was the subject of filmmaker Sahar Sarshar's documentary, Writing in Motion: A Nation Divided.[13]
In 2013, Thien was the Simon Fraser University Writer-in-Residence.[14] From 2010 to 2015, she was part of the International Faculty in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at City University of Hong Kong. She wrote about the program's abrupt closure, and Hong Kong's crackdown on freedom of speech, in an essay for The Guardian.[15] In 2016, Thien objected to the University of British Columbia's handling of complaints made against Steven Galloway, a professor in the Creative Writing department until he was fired. In a five-page letter, she stressed the importance of due process and asked that her name be removed from all of UBC's promotional materials.[16] She currently teaches in the Brooklyn College MFA Program. [17]
Awards and nominations
Thien's first book, Simple Recipes (Toronto: M&S, 2001; New York: Little, Brown, 2002), a collection of short stories, won the City of Vancouver Book Award, the VanCity Book Prize and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. It received the praise of Nobel Prize laureate Alice Munro, who wrote: "This is surely the debut of a splendid writer. I am astonished by the clarity and ease of the writing, and a kind of emotional purity."[18]
