Award-winning author Madeleine Thien grew up in Vancouver and even attended SFU as a student. Her prose is lauded as “elegant” and “deeply empathetic” with “language both precise and lyrical,” handling sensitive subject matter with compassion.
Thien is now returning to Vancouver for eight months — as the SFU English Department’s new Writer-in-Residence. She normally splits her time between Montreal and Berlin: “I left [Vancouver] when I was 28. I’m 39 now and I’m just excited to be back here.”
“I travel a lot, partly due to circumstances and partly for research. If I’m writing about a particular place, I like to immerse myself in it,” explains Thien, who has also lived in the Netherlands, Quebec City, and Hong Kong, where she teaches in a Masters program. She also lived in Cambodia, surrounding herself with the culture and the politics, which contributed to her 2011 novel Dogs at the Perimeter.
Thien studied english literature and dance at SFU, and later transferred to UBC to complete her degree in literature and creative writing. She also completed UBC’s creative writing MFA program during which she finished her first book, Simple Recipes.
Published in 2001, the collection of short stories received the City of Vancouver Book Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her 2006 novel, Certainty, also received critical acclaim; it has been translated into more than 18 languages, and won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award, as well as the Ovid Festival Prize of Romania.
If I’m writing about a particular place, I like to immerse myself in it.”
Madeleine Thien, author
Thien’s current novel-in-progress is about music students at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s. The idea came from “many different things crystallizing,” says Thien. “The students are studying western classical music just before the Cultural Revolution in China. [The novel] looks at the transmission of ideas and artistic practices, and how political thought travels from East to West and West to East.”
During her time as Writer-in-Residence, Thien will be working on her new novel as well as holding office hours to consult with students, and curating and hosting public events. The inaugural reading and reception for the Residency was on Sept. 27 at SFU Woodward’s. “I felt really at home,” Thien says nostalgically.
Previous SFU Writers-in-Residence include poets Fred Wah, Larissa Lai, and Daphne Marlatt, Wayde Compton (prior to his position as Director of The Writer’s Studio), and, most recently, Canadian Métis playwright Marie Clements.
“Anyone in the university and in the community is able to submit,” says Thien, explaining how her consultation hours work. She usually teaches creative writing for fiction but other genres are acceptable too.
“We have an open discussion that will hopefully be helpful for them. It is very individual. It’s mentoring but it is more a peer-to-peer, writer talking to writer. The best I can do for any other writer is to give a sensitive reading of their work, being as good a reader as possible and reflecting the work back to them. I learned this from teaching as well as working with my own editor — editing, revising, re-engaging with the piece.”
