Madeleine Thien has won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing. As the winner, this Canadian author will receive $100,000 in prize money.
The Canadian edition was published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada. The American edition was published by W.W. Norton. The members of this year’s jury include Lawrence Hill, Jeet Heer, Samantha Harvey, Kathleen Winter, and Alan Warner.
The jury gave this statement in the press release: “Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien entranced the jurors with its detailed, layered, complex drama of classical musicians and their loved ones trying to survive two monstrous insults to their humanity: Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in mid-twentieth century China and the Tiananmen Square massacre of protesters in Beijing in 1989. Do Not Say We Have Nothing addresses some of the timeless questions of literature: who do we love, and how do the love of art, of others and ourselves sustain us individually and collectively in the face of genocide? A beautiful homage to music and to the human spirit, Do Not Say We Have Nothing is both sad and uplifting in its dramatization of human loss and resilience in China and in Canada.” (via CBC.ca)