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Madeleine Thien: Displacement and Defiance

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‘I like to think of home as a verb, something we keep re-creating,’ Madeleine Thien has said.

It’s an exhilarating idea from a Man Booker-shortlisted author who is continually drawn to themes of displacement, individual expression and revolution. Thien is Canadian and of Chinese-Malaysian descent and she’s dramatised the traumatic upheavals of 20th-century Asian history in some extraordinary works of fiction.

Her 2011 book, Dogs at the Perimeter, was set in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, while her most recent work, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, explores the profound, abiding impact of the Cultural Revolution in China. The latter novel, shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker prize, tells the story of two musical families in China, from the 1940s through the Tiananmen Square protests to the present day. The work draws in surprising, exquisite ways on Western classical music and turns on themes of artistic and individual defiance and frailty in Mao’s China.

Appearing in conversation with author (and Chinese history buff) Toni Jordan, Thien will discuss political upheaval and the artistic imagination.

Featuring

Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and the novels Certainty (2006) and Dogs at the Perimeter (2012), the latter of which was shortlisted for Berlin’s 2014 International Literature Award and won the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 LiBeraturpreis. Her m... Read more

Toni Jordan

Toni Jordan is the author of six novels including the international best-seller Addition, Nine Days, which was awarded Best Fiction at the 2012 Indie Awards, and Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (2016), which was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and for the Voss Literary Award. Toni ho... Read more

Location

The Wheeler Centre

176 Little Lonsdale Street Melbourne Victoria 3000

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