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] ). 

Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001), and three novels,  Certainty  (2006); Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), shortlisted for Berlin’s  International Literature Prize and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Liberaturpreis; and Do Not Say We Have Nothing  (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. 

Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and an Edward Stanford Prize; and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize 2017. The novel was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2016 and longlisted for a Carnegie Medal.