Madeleine Thien on her novel Certainty
This is one of the very earliest Biblio File interviews. Please excuse the audio.
(Listening to it - I'm embarrassed to learn that I wasn't able to read all of Certainty before conducting the interview - despite not having had much time to prepare [This would never happen today - well, except in the case of Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, but that's another story] ).\xa0
Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of the story collection\xa0Simple Recipes (2001), and three novels, \xa0Certainty \xa0(2006);\xa0Dogs at the Perimeter\xa0(2011), shortlisted for Berlin\u2019s \xa0International Literature Prize\xa0and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair\u2019s 2015\xa0Liberaturpreis; and\xa0Do Not Say We Have Nothing\xa0 (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.\xa0
Do Not Say We Have Nothing\xa0won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor-General\u2019s Literary Award for Fiction, and an Edward Stanford Prize; and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women\u2019s Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize 2017. The novel was named a New York Times Critics\u2019 Top Book of 2016 and longlisted for a Carnegie Medal.