Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thienwas born in Vancouver in 1974, the daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants who came to Canada in the early 1970s. She studied Dance at Simon Fraser Univesity before completing a degree in English Literature at the University of British Columbia. In 2001, Madeleine published her first book, Simple Recipes. A collection of short fiction, Simple Recipes tells the stories of families, many of them immigrants, in Vancouver's east side neighbourhoods. The book won four awards in Canada, including the Canadian Authors AssociationAward for Most Promising Canadian Writer under the age of 30, and a nomination for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. The New York Times Book Review lauded Simple Recipes as the work of "a writer of precocious poise. The austere grace and polished assurance of Thien's writing is remarkable... Though her characters dream of following simple recipes, they are themselves undeniably original creations." In 2006, Madeleine published her first novel, Certainty, to international acclaim. To date, Certainty has been published in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, and translated into 14 languages, including French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Serbian, Hebrew and Vietnamese. Set in the aftermath of the Second World War in Sabah (the former British North Borneo, now East Malaysia), Certainty follows the lives of two children, Matthew and Ani, whose lives are displaced in the violence and turmoil of the Japanese Occupation. The Boston Globe praised Certainty as "a glorious exception to the writing-by-numbers rule. No detail is missed, and each one is telling, whether Thien describes starving prisoners of war or a sleeping child, the bombcratered
jungle or the Indonesian sunrise. Great or small, all wounds are masterfully and delicately exposed."Certainty was a finalist for the US-based Kiriyama Prize for Fiction alongside Booker-winner Kiran Desai and Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. It went on to win the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, a prize that has drawn attention to the early work of writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Anne Michaels and Joseph Boyden, among others. Since 2002, Madeleine has made her home in the Netherlands, in Quebec City, and now in Montreal.
She has also traveled extensively in Southeast Asia. The publication of Certainty has brought her work to a greater international audience, and she has taken part in dozens of literary festivals around the world, including Hong Kong, Helsinki, Paris, Munich, Shanghai, Sydney, Edinburgh, Berlin, Montreal, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Prague, Ubud, and Singapore. In 2008, she will take part in the prestigious International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, which invites 30 acclaimed, overseas writers to live in residency for a short period each year, and to exchange ideas on literature, language and writing.
Madeleine's work has been taught in universities across North America and Europe and her stories continue to be widely anthologized. They can be found in Literature: A Pocket Anthology (Pearson, 2007) and The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (Penguin, 2007), among other publications.
She is currently at work on a new novel, due to be published in the spring of 2010.
Madeleine Thien
