The novel has been published internationally and translated into 16 languages. Thien's debut novel, Certainty (Toronto: M&S, 2006 New York: Little, Brown, 2007 London: Faber, 2007), follows a documentary producer as she searches for the truth about her father's experience living in Japanese-occupied Malaysia. The story follows a young Chinese girl's journey as she and her musician father adjust to life in Vancouver.

In the same year, Thien adapted artist Joe Chang's National Film Board short film, The Chinese Violin (2001), into a children's book. The book is a collection of short fiction pieces exploring conflicts within intergenerational and, in two stories, intercultural relationships. In 2001, her first book titled Simple Recipes was published. In an interview with Granta from 2016, she states that she is thinking about 'the way that women’s lives are expressed in literature at this moment,' and that she is interested in writing about nonwhite women and sexuality. Many of Thien's works focus on the theme of time in connection to place and human emotion. Thien was a finalist for Writers' Trust of Canada's RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 1999, and in 2001 she was awarded the Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop for her short story collection Simple Recipes. Prior to working as an editor to the Rice Paper Magazine, she worked, from an early age in clerical, retail and restaurant jobs. Thien made the decision to switch from dance to creative writing for a few reasons, but mainly due to the fact that she felt inadequate in talent, despite her passion for the art. She studied contemporary dance at Simon Fraser University and a earned Master's degree in Fine Arts specializing in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Thien was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1974 to a Malaysian Chinese father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize.

Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Madeleine Thien ( traditional Chinese: 鄧敏靈 simplified Chinese: 邓敏灵 born 1974) is a Canadian short story writer and novelist.

Thien madeleine