邓敏灵

邓敏灵（1974年—）是一位华裔加拿大女作家。邓敏灵的父母是马来西亚华侨，1970年代移民到加拿大，邓敏灵在加拿大出生，邓敏灵在西门菲沙大学主修英文文学和现代舞，期后进入卑诗大学，修毕创意写作的硕士课程。邓敏灵于2001年正式出道出版了短篇小说集《简单食谱》，即获得温哥华市图书奖，随后她陆续发表了《确定性》(2006年)及《边界的狗》(2011年)，均得到好评。2016年，她凭《不要说我们一无所有》同时入围布克奖、吉勒奖以及总督文学奖。

作品列表

《简单食谱》 — 2001

《二胡》 — 2002

《确定性》 — 2006

《边界的狗》 — 2011

《不要说我们一无所有》 — 2016

Madeleine Thien (traditional Chinese: 鄧敏靈; simplified Chinese: 邓敏灵; pinyin: Dèng Mǐnlíng; b. 1974) is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.

Early life and education

Thien was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1974 to a Malaysian Chinese father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother. She studied contemporary dance at Simon Fraser University and earned a Master's degree in Fine Arts specializing in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Thien made the decision to switch from dance to creative writing for a few reasons, but mainly due to the fact that she felt inadequate in talent, despite her passion for the art. Prior to working as an editor for the Rice Paper Magazine, she worked from an early age in clerical, retail and restaurant jobs. Thien was a finalist for Writers' Trust of Canada's RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 1999, and in 2001 she was awarded the Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop for her short story collection Simple Recipes.

Career

Many of Thien's works focus on the theme of time in connection to place and human emotion. In an interview with Granta from 2016, she states that she is thinking about "the way that women’s lives are expressed in literature at this moment," and that she is interested in writing about nonwhite women and sexuality.

Publications

In 2001, her first book titled Simple Recipes was published. The book is a collection of short fiction pieces exploring conflicts within intergenerational and, in two stories, intercultural relationships. In the same year, Thien adapted artist Joe Chang's National Film Board short film, The Chinese Violin (2001), into a children's book. The story follows a young Chinese girl's journey as she and her musician father adjust to life in Vancouver.

Thien's debut novel, Certainty (Toronto: M&S, 2006; New York: Little, Brown, 2007; London: Faber, 2007), follows a documentary producer as she searches for the truth about her father's experience living in Japanese-occupied Malaysia. The novel has been published internationally and translated into 16 languages.

Her second novel, Dogs at the Perimeter (Toronto: M&S, 2011; London: Granta Books, 2012), is about associates at Montreal's Brain Research Centre and their traumatic ties to the Cambodian genocide. The novel has been translated into nine languages.

Her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), follows the life of Li-Ling, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant, as she becomes the keeper of a mysterious work, the Book of Records, following her father's suicide. The story also focuses on her father and his friends' lives as young musicians growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Thien's 2025 novel Book of Records is a polyphonic novel that follows a young refugee named Lina and her father as they take shelter in a labyrinthine enclave where the stories of historical figures — including Baruch Spinoza, Hannah Arendt, and Du Fu — intertwine with their own family's past.