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Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001), and two novels, Certainty (2006) and Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), which was shortlisted for Berlins International Literature Prize, and won the Frankfurt Book Fairs 2015 Lißeraturpreis. Her books are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and have been translated into 22 languages. Her short fiction appears inThe New Anthology of Canadian Literature, The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, The Broadview Introduction to Literature, Literature: A Pocket Anthology and elsewhere. Her work has been awarded the City of Vancouver Book Award, Amazon First Novel Award, a Canadian Authors Association Award, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and The Ovid Festival Prize, and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, and The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.

Genres: Literary Fiction

New and upcoming books

May 2025

The Book of Records

Novels

   Certainty (2006)
   Dogs at the Perimeter (2011)
   Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016)
   The Book of Records (2025)

Collections

Simple Recipes (2001)

Anthologies edited

The Journey Prize (2016)

Picture Books show

Books containing stories by Madeleine Thien

Six Shorts 2015 (2015)
The finalists for The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award

Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007)
edited by
Jane Urquhart

Award nominations

	2017 Women's Prize For Fiction (nominee) : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
	2017 The Writers' Prize for Fiction (nominee) : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
	2016 Booker Prize (shortlist) : Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Madeleine Thien recommends

Elsewhere (2023)
Yan Ge
"A gripping, stunning work, worldly and otherworldly. Rich with philosophical depths, comedy, feeling and playfulness, Elsewhere is a wondrous book of books. It is like new light in an old, searching world."

Half Life (2021)
Krista Foss
"Every sentence is alive in this miraculous novel--one in which the listening ear of Niels Bohr bends towards an aspiring physicist, where history walks beside science, and where a world 'undaunted by paradox' exists only in theory. What do we believe, and who, and why? How do we continue if denied the love entwined with belief? What if forgiveness itself becomes a lasting injury? Krista Foss has a vast heart. She is a stunning writer."

Land of Big Numbers (2021)
Te-Ping Chen
"A spectacular work, comic, timely, profound. Te-Ping Chen has a superb eye for detail in a China where transformation occurs simultaneously too fast and too slow for lives in pursuit of meaning in a brave new world. Her characters are achingly alive. It’s rare to read a collection so satisfying, where every story adds to a gripping and intricate world."

Petra (2020)
Shaena Lambert
"Petra is a masterpiece--a fierce, humane and powerful novel for our times. Shaena Lambert brings to life the nearly forgotten revolutionary, Petra Kelly, and the circle of activists who transformed environmental and global politics. Petra, the story of generations reckoning with history, sex, the land, guilt, and our troubled future, is at every moment personal and political. What does it mean to remake not only the world but one another, what if our inner morality is riddled with falsehoods, why do we harm in the name of love? Spellbinding and shattering, Petra is a tour de force--a haunting and a courageous awakening."

How to Pronounce Knife (2020)
Souvankham Thammavongsa
"How to Pronounce Knife is a riveting, subversive collection that alights within us like a shock to the system. I find it miraculous - and liberating and joyful - that language so radiantly exact can be so raw, so brazen. This is a major work and a lasting one."

Polar Vortex (2020)
Shani Mootoo
"How to know the shifting pieces of ourselves, how to acknowledge contradictory desires, as we are pulled into the maelstrom of desire and memory? Shani Mootoo's intimate new novel suspends us in the vortex between acts of betrayal and acts of love. It is a powerfully unsettling work from a brilliant artist."

The Voyage of the Morning Light (2019)
Marina Endicott
"An immersive reading experience, the kind that makes one think, and think again...How movingly the novel considers the otherness between people, between the world and us, between human and all other life. Its boldness has a deep humility. Marina Endicott allows her characters to exist without being afraid of their (and our) moral dilemmas and failures, or the gap between our intentions and our understanding. She writes about goodness so well?so beautifully and joyfully. I feel as if I could close my eyes and still be at sea with these characters. A wonderful, brilliant book."

Madame Victoria (2018)
Catherine Leroux
"Surely one of our most gifted writers."

Music of the Ghosts (2017)
Vaddey Ratner
"Music of the Ghosts is a novel of extraordinary humanity in the face of unforgivable culpability. Here, acts of friendship transform into acts of rebellion, and storytelling reveals not only the past, but this moment, when reconciliation and forgiveness are so desperately needed. Vaddey Ratner speaks to the choices confronting all of us, and she does so with compassion, forewarning and courageous wisdom."

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