Madeleine Thien
Former office, Ricepaper Magazine, 245 East Broadway
"A thick fog had settled over the skyline. It wiped the sky clear of mountains and water. I walked along Broadway, past Main Street, where paper cups and newspapers littered the sidewalk. My father, the tour guide who took me everywhere. He must have loved this city."
From Simple Recipes
Before Ricepaper went digital-only in 2016, this was the main editorial address of the publication for which Madeleine Thien briefly served as editor during the mid-1990s. Many of today’s acclaimed Asian-Canadian writers were first published in Ricepaper, the literary periodical founded in B.C. by Jim Wong-Chu and the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop (ACWW). A West Coast-centric anthology, AlliterAsian: Twenty Years of Ricepaper Magazine (Arsenal Pulp) was produced to mark the 20th anniversary of Ricepaper, co-edited by Allan Cho, Julia Lin, and Jim Wong-Chu.Among those interviewed was former Ricepaper editor Madeleine Thien, whose fourth book, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 2016. It was also one of six works of fiction shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. This recognition represented an unprecedented triad for a B.C.-born author. The only previous Giller recipient to have won while living in B.C. was Calgary-born Esi Edugyan of Victoria for Half-Blood Blues in 2011. Both their novels were published in Ontario.
