Madeleine Thien

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Madeleine Thien (2014)

Madeleine Thien (born May 25, 1974 in Vancouver , British Columbia ) is a Canadian writer .

Life

Madeleine Thien, whose parents came to Canada as Malay- Chinese immigrants in the 1960s, grew up in Vancouver. After high school, she graduated from Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia . She graduated with a Masters Degree in Creative Writing .

She started writing as a student. Her short stories are based in the economics of language on the commandments of the Iowa writers workshop of the US author John Gardner . After that, every word counts in a short story . Thien achieved rapid success as a writer, and her first literary work garnered prizes in many literary competitions. She then chose literature as her profession.

The author moved with her husband for a while to the Netherlands and later to Québec (city) . She traveled extensively in Southeast Asia to research her novels. Thien now lives in Montreal .

In May 2020, Thien made an appeal with other cultural workers not to cooperate with German institutions that support or apply the Bundestag resolution against the BDS movement of May 2019. This would be an opinion that you previously z. B. submitted to the Goethe-Institut, is no longer possible. Thien declared himself a BDS supporter in 2020.

Works

Thien in 2012
  • Do Not Say We Have Nothing . Granta, London 2016 ISBN 978-1-78378-266-6
    • Übers. Anette Grube: Don't say we have nothing . Novel. Luchterhand, Munich 2017
  • Dogs at the Perimeter . 2011
  • Certainty . 2006.
  • with Joe Chang : The Chinese Violin . Children's book. Whitecap Books, Vancouver 2001 ISBN 1-55285-205-9
  • Simple recipes . 2001

"Simple recipes"

The cover story portrays the deep horror of a child that, figuratively speaking, their own father has more than one face . In the second short story, a young woman looks back on those four days in Oregon when her mother left her father and the world collapsed for the children.

Life abroad is one of the central themes in the stories. The stories have a certain autobiographical foundation.

Despite the sometimes dramatic events, the language is soberly limited to the necessary, but at the same time sensitive. The stories have been translated into German by Almuth Carstens.

"That longing for certainty"

According to Thiens, the starting point for the novel was the fate of her grandfather in an interview for 3sat magazine denkmal . He was born in China and sent to Malaysia as a child , where he was educated in the schools of the British colonial administration. During the Japanese occupation of Malaysia in World War II, he became a forced collaborator . After the war, Thien says, her grandfather was "murdered because he knew too much".

“From that point everything has grown. The story of my grandfather and the aftermath of the war served as a kind of shadow in my book. "

- Madeleine Thien, 3Sat interview from March 22, 2007

In the spring of 2000, the then 26-year-old author carried out research on site in Malaysia. In the novel, her alter ego is the journalist Gail on a similar mission. She travels to the Netherlands to learn something new from a war reporter and contemporary witness. In a novel-like form, it is a kind of historical reappraisal of the consequences of the war in today's Malaysia or Indonesia . The search for family history certainties is just as much a rebellion against forgetting as the search for identity.

“It is definitely a novel about a loss, a funeral speech. (...) When I was just starting to write, around 2002, my mother died unexpectedly. "

- Madeleine Thien, quoted in the DLF book market on September 3, 2007

Awards

For her first book publication Simple Recipes in 2001 she received numerous literary prizes such as the City of Vancouver Book Award , the VanCity Book Prize and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize . She received the Air Canada Award for most promising writers under age 30 from the Canadian Authors Association .

Her debut novel Certainty has been licensed and published worldwide. He received the Amazon.ca First Novel Award (2006) and was a finalist at the California Kiriyama Prize .

In 2015, she was awarded the LiBeraturpreis for her novel Fleeting Souls .

Her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing , which is set from the perspective of a Chinese family before, during and after the Tian'anmen massacre , won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 2016. He was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction .

literature

  • Nora Tunkel: The Poetics of Orientation: On Truths and Certainties: Madeleine Thien , in dies., Transcultural imaginaries. History and globalization in contemporary Canadian literature . Winter, Heidelberg 2012, pp. 155-167. Zugl. Diss. Phil. University of Vienna 2009

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Henning: Three ladies with chill. In: Spiegel online. April 16, 2007.
  2. ↑ a b Presentation of the finalist of the Kiriyami Prize from 2007 as a member of the five-person jury from 2008
  3. ↑ The Call ; BDS decision of the German Bundestag, May 17, 2019
  4. ^ Notes of the pearl diver on the review , FAZ , April 17, 2008.
  5. ↑ a b Interview by Judith Eckstein with Thien , March 22, 2007.
  6. ↑ a b novel about a loss , Deutschlandfunk - review of those longing for certainty , in Büchermarkt , September 3, 2007.
  7. ↑ Madeleine Thien wins 2016 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction at: cbc.ca (English), accessed on May 13, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Thien, Madeleine
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1974
PLACE OF BIRTH Vancouver , British Columbia