Madeleine Thien: Writing The Book of Records

In 2020, the Canadian writer Madeleine Thien was working on her next novel, the follow-up to her prizewinning 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’s a process which moves from Berlin to Brooklyn and finally to Portugal's capital city Lisbon, where she hoped to complete it. Five years later, the novel, called The Book of Records, is being published, and this programme looks back at the long process of its creation.