Madeleine Thien

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 was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.

Madeleine Thien studied at Simon Fraser University and University of British Columbia. The recorded working language is English. Employment is recorded with Brooklyn College. Works named in the authority record are Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Distinctions recorded are Giller Prize, Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, Amazon.ca First Novel Award and City of Vancouver Book Award.

• Name — Madeleine Thien • Born — 1974 • Birthplace — Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • Education — * Simon Fraser University • University of British Columbia • Occupation — Writer • Partner — Rawi Hage • Notable Works — Do Not Say We Have Nothing • Awards — Guggenheim Fellow (2026) • Website — madeleinethien.com

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. 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. 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.

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.

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. The study tour was the subject of filmmaker Sahar Sarshar's documentary, Writing in Motion: A Nation Divided. In 2013, Thien was the Simon Fraser University Writer-in-Residence. 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. 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. She currently teaches in the Brooklyn College MFA Program.

Thien lives in Montreal and is the common-law partner of novelist Rawi Hage. She wrote about her close friend, academic Y-Dang Troeung, after Troeung's death in 2023.

Madeleine Thien is recorded as having received Giller Prize, Governor General's Award for English-language fiction and Amazon.ca First Novel Award.