![]() In Shanghai, a favourite city, Thien has met strangers while sitting by the road, watching the world pass by, which she can happily do “for hours.” People approach her in part because in Asia, she said, a lone traveller is seen as an unfortunate, in need of sociable assistance. “Some were extremely grumpy, or they didn’t like to have a bath, or they got shy about certain things because they’d had different experiences. “It was like summer camp.” In the mornings, she worked on the text that become Dogs at the Perimeter, her prize-winning second novel, and during the afternoons she talked with mahouts (keepers) and built up character sketches of the elephants. “I did it for a month,” she said during a conversation in Montreal. That was how Thien – whose novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing is on the short list for the Man Booker Prize, the Giller Prize and a Governor-General’s Award – became an elephant biographer. ![]() He was also a vet at a home for retired forestry elephants, and wanted someone to write brief life stories of his charges. But she’s adept at striking up conversations with strangers, like the man next to her on a bus in Laos a few years ago, who was reading one of her favourite books: 100 Years of Solitude. ![]() Madeleine Thien is a soft-spoken woman who needs lots of time alone and says she’s no good at parties. ![]()
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