On Friday, using our ‘Two Together Railcard’, Peter and Sian travelled through to Edinburgh:
We were off to:
To be in the audience to hear Madeleine Thien and Deepa Bhasthi discuss ‘The Sanctity of Language’:
Following the discussion and readings from the authors books, the audience were invited to ask questions. I took the opportunity to ask a question based on a short passage from Madeleine Thien’s book ‘Do Not Say We Have Nothing’, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize:
“Such openness and curiosity, out of shyness”
This is an audio recording of my question and Madeleine Thien’s thoughtful reply. The quality of the recording is fairly poor, so here is a transcript:
Peter’s question to Madeleine Thien, Edinburgh 15th August 2025
Sorry to turn away a bit from translation. In Madeleine’s last book, there was a beautiful line, which I think says something like “such openness and curiosity out of shyness”. And my question really is about narrative control.
The voices in our times, maybe in all times – but particularly in these times, seem to be the loudest, the brashest. So do you think artists and writers like yourself can bring about that gentleness, the shyness, that brings the curiosity and the beauty of the world?
Madeleine Thien:
I really have been struggling with it, because I feel like, when we’re talking about this backstage, our natural state is a state of quiet. And how, in a sense, sometimes I long for all of us to feel quiet, so that we could listen better.
And it does feel like quietness is never going to win this world. But it did make me think that part of what we’re doing is to try to create those spaces in a novel, in a story, in a translation that allows for the reader to find that, for it to open for them. I mean, I think what I loved about the Darwish poem, what I love about your translation, what I love myself about writing, is that we have to put a lot of trust in the reader.
That there is a space which only they can step into, and which only they have the ears to hear or to listen. And they will hear things that we ourselves can’t hear in these books. So maybe the vocation is as much as possible to make those kinds of passageways as… Yeah, I think just to add to that, I think the softness also comes from so much from the readers themselves.
They might be reading about something that is not softer, kinder. But then they think, the book is not just made by the writer, it’s also equally made by the reader of that book. So they bring their own lived experiences and their softness onto the book as well.
Afterwards, at book-signing, Madeleine Thien wrote this for me in her latest book:
