Ref. No.: 105

Memorial University's Department of English and Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences are delighted to announce that Madeleine Thien will give the E. J. Pratt Lecture on Monday, Nov. 10. 

PHOTO CAPTION: Madeleine Thien's books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia and have been translated into 25 languages. Photo courtesy Madeleine Thien

Ms. Thien’s lecture, What Is It to Imagine?, is a luminous and moving reflection on imagination, memory and the world, with a range of reference that spans from fourth-century Chinese poetry to the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard. The piece is filled with the sharp prose and moral clarity familiar to readers of Ms. Thien’s fiction. 

The lecture takes place at the LSPU Hall, 3 Victoria St., in St. John’s, at 8 p.m.

Admission is free and all are invited to attend. 

Ms. Thien is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001), and four novels: Certainty (2006); Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), shortlisted for Berlin’s International Literature Prize and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Liberaturpreis; Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s, and about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations; and The Book of Records (2025), set in a building made of time. Her books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia and have been translated into 25 languages.

E. J. Pratt Lecture

The Pratt Lecture is the oldest public lecture at Memorial University, inaugurated in 1968 when Northrop Frye gave an address titled Silence in the Sea, which later appeared in his essay collection The Bush Garden, a foundational work in Canadian literary studies. Over the ensuing decades, lecturers have included Cleanth Brooks, David Lodge, Ursula K. Le Guin, Alberto Manguel, Linda Hutcheon and Helen Vendler. In the past decade alone, Peter Balkwill, Dionne Brand, Anne Carson, George Elliott Clarke and Mary Dalton have all given lectures.

This year’s lecture will be unusual in that the Memorial University Press and Breakwater Books have collaborated to publish an anthology of 10 Pratt lectures edited by Department of English associate professor Dr. Andrew Loman, whose introduction situates each of the lectures in its critical and historical context. The book is scheduled to launch on Nov. 10, as well, timed to coincide with Ms. Thien’s lecture, which is the concluding piece in the anthology. The publication of The E. J. Pratt Lectures: 1968–2025 has been made possible by the Memorial University 100th Anniversary Fund and is the culmination of decades of work on the part of the Department of English. 

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For more information or for an interview, please contact the Department of English's Dr. Andrew Loman at aloman@mun.ca.