This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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This years speakers are:
Denise Chong
Literature and Rendering Memory
Madeleine Thien
The Field of Sound: J.S. Bach, China and the Possibilities of Personhood
Followed by an interview with the two authors by Smaro Kamboureli
Denise Chong has straddled two worlds: writing and public service. Trained as an economist, she began her writing life after a career in the federal Department of Finance where she served as senior economic advisor for then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Her first book, The Concubines Children 1994, a Globe and Mail best seller for 93 weeks and translated into a dozen languages, is the first non-fiction narrative of a Chinese family in Canada; Lives of the family: Stories of Fate and Circumstance 2013, is a follow-up narrative that traces the lives of three Chinese families in the Ottawa region. A two-time finalist for the Governor-Generals literary award, she is also the author of Egg on Mao 2009, about a bus mechanics defiance during the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, and The Girl in the Picture: The Kim Phuc Story, about the napalm girl of the iconic photograph from the Vietnam War. Recognized for writing books that raise our social consciousness, she continues to pursue her interests in public policy. She holds four honorary doctorates and is an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Madeleine Thien, born in Vancouver, is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes 2001, and two novels, Certainty 2006 and Dogs at the Perimeter 2011, the latter the winner of the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fairs LiBeraturpreis prize, which recognizes avant-garde literature by women writers. Translated into 24 languages, her work has received numerous awards, including the City of Vancouver Book Award, Amazon First Novel Award, a Canadian Authors Association Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Ovid Festival Prize, and shortlisted for Berlin's International Literature Prize, the Kiriyama Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her literary criticism, on topics as diverse as female beauty, state surveillance, visual art, race, literary politics, the Quebec rodeo and the Singapore elections has appeared in many Canadian and international venues, including Granta, The Guardian, Financial Times, and Al Jazeera English. Her third novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s, will be published by Knopf in 2016.
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