November 7, 2016 (Toronto, Ontario) -

Madeleine Thien has been named the winner of the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada. The announcement was made at a black-tie dinner and award ceremony hosted by Steve Patterson, attended by nearly 500 members of the publishing, media and arts communities. The gala awards were broadcast by CBC and live-streamed on CBCBooks.ca.

This year the prize celebrates its 23rd anniversary.

The shortlist of six authors and their books, announced on September 26, 2016, is:

Mona Awad for her novel 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, published by Penguin Canada

Gary Barwin for his novel Yiddish for Pirates, published by Random House Canada

Emma Donoghue for her novel The Wonder, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Catherine Leroux for her novel The Party Wall, published by Biblioasis, translated by Lazer Lederhendler

Madeleine Thien for her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing, published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada

Zoe Whittall for her novel The Best Kind of People, published by House of Anansi Press Inc.

The five-member jury panel made up of Lawrence Hill (jury chair), Samantha Harvey, Jeet Heer, Alan Warner and Kathleen Winter selected the shortlist and ultimate winner.

Of the winning book, the jury wrote:

"Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien entranced the jurors with its 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 of protestors in Beijing in 1989. Do Not Say We Have Nothing addresses some of the timeless questions of literature: who do we love, and how do the love of art, of others and ourselves sustain us individually and collectively in the face of genocide? A beautiful homage to music and to the human spirit, Do Not Say We Have Nothing is both sad and uplifting in its dramatization of human loss and resilience in China and in Canada."

MADELEINE THIEN is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes, which was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, a Kiriyama Pacific Prize Notable Book, and won the BC Book Prize for Fiction; the novel Certainty, which won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award; and the novel Dogs at the Perimeter, which was shortlisted for Berlin's 2014 International Literature Award and won the Frankfurt Book Fair's 2015 Liberaturpreis. Her novels and stories have been translated into twenty-five languages, and her essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, the Financial Times, Five Dials, Brick and Al Jazeera. Her story "The Wedding Cake" was shortlisted for the prestigious 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the 2016 Governor General's Literary Award. The daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants to Canada, she lives in Montreal.

During tonight's award ceremony, guests enjoyed a performance by Canadian R&B singer/songwriter Jully Black and a roster of celebrity presenters ? Catherine Reitman, Gordon Pinsent, Amanda Parris, Ins Choi, Tanya Tagaq and Annie Murphy ? introduced the shortlisted authors and presented video profiles highlighting the nominated books.