Man Booker Prize finalist Madeleine Thien on Monday won Canada’s Giller Prize, the country’s richest fiction award, for “Do Not Say We Have Nothing”, about a young woman’s flight from China after the Tiananmen Square protests.
The $74,700 prize was awarded in Toronto by a five-member jury, reports Reuters.
The jury wrote that they were entranced by the book’s “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.”
The book had also been nominated for the Booker Prize, but last month lost out to American Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout”, a biting satire on race relations in the United States.
