Madeleine Thien has been named as the 2016 recipient of Canada’s Giller Prize, the country’s most prominent fiction award, Reuters reports. The author won the $100,000 award — the equivalent of about $75,000 USD — for her third novel, “Do Not Say We Have Nothing.”
The book centers on “an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations,” its description on Amazon details: “those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the mid-twentieth century, and the children of the survivors, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989.” Thien is the daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants.
The Giller Prize jury expressed admiration for the “detailed, layered, complex drama of classical musicians and their loved ones trying to survive two monstrous insults to their humanity.”
Prior to penning “Do Not Say We Have Nothing,” Thien wrote the novels “Certainty” and “Dogs at the Perimeter,” and the story collection “Simple Recipes.” The Vancouver-born author’s work has been translated into 25 languages. “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” was also a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.
Previous Giller Prize winners include Lynn Coady’s “Hellgoing,” Alice Munro’s “Runaway,” and Margaret Atwood’s “Alias Grace,” the latter of which is being adapted into a Netflix miniseries written and produced by Sarah Polley (“Stories We Tell”) and directed by Mary Harron (“American Pyscho”).
