Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien (born 1974) is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It 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.