In the Studio: Madeleine Thien

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2020, the Canadian writer Madeleine Thien was working on her next novel, the follow-up to her prize-winning 2016 book Do Not Say We Have Nothing. But it was difficult to find the internal peace and privacy to begin again, especially after being catapulted into the public eye by the previous novel’s success. Paul Kobrak followed her over several months as she created the first drafts of the new novel. It is a process which moves from Berlin to Brooklyn and finally to Portugal's capital city Lisbon. Five years later, the novel, called The Book of Records, is being published.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service, the program that delves
0:05.8	into the creative process. Today, we're offering you the chance to hear an edition of the series
0:11.7	that was first broadcast in 2020, near the start of a process that is only now reaching its
0:18.7	completion. Several years ago, the world of the sea returned to me,
0:23.7	and I saw once more the two windows, north and west-facing, of our former rooms.
0:28.3	I saw the curtains moving and heard a shifting of my father's ledgers, his calendar, his books.
0:34.0	It was a cold breeze, the kind that comes in the early morning or at the fall of night.
0:38.3	There was a warning to it.
0:40.2	These may be the opening words of the next novel by Madeline Tien.
0:45.5	But equally, they may not.
0:48.0	Every day that she writes brings new thoughts and new ways of seeing the world in her imagination.
0:54.6	It has never been printed, not even a single page of it.
0:58.8	I like that it just exists in my head.
1:01.6	I mean, I know it exists on the computer and a file in a digital format,
1:05.4	but it feels like it only exists in my head.
1:09.0	And I want to keep it that way for as long as possible.
1:13.3	I don't want to see it on paper yet. I don't want it to be tangible and concrete in a paper way.
1:20.2	I don't want it to look like a book yet. I just want to think about what this thing is.
1:25.3	Often we follow the completion of a work,
1:27.9	an installation in a museum or a new performance,
1:30.7	with deadlines and tickets sold,
1:33.0	definite points of resolution and finishing.
	...

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