Canadian · b. 1974
Madeleine Thien writes about the aftershocks of political violence. The Canadian author's "Do Not Say We Have Nothing" (2016) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize—a multigenerational saga of Chinese musicians surviving the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square. Thien's prose is lyrical but disciplined, finding beauty in devastation. Her family's own history of war and displacement in Malaysia and China feeds her fiction.