Acclaimed Canadian author Madeleine Thien will visit Memorial University to deliver this year’s E. J. Pratt Lecture.

Ms. Thien, whose celebrated novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award, is known for stories that span generations and continents.

Since publishing her first book, Simple Recipes, in 2001, she has established herself as one of Canada’s most thoughtful and internationally recognized voices.

Now, she is set to present, What Is It to Imagine?, a lecture that moves between fourth-century Chinese poetry and modern philosophy to ask how art and memory can illuminate the times we live in.

Ahead of her lecture, Ms. Thien spoke with the Gazette to discuss memory and the value of imagination in the modern world.

Joshua Goudie: Across your writing, readers encounter memory and displacement as recurring themes. How has your sense of these ideas changed or evolved over time?

Madeleine Thien: I really believe ideas have a living quality, and are renewed and altered each time we grapple with them.

Writing this lecture gave me a chance to really examine the relationship between memory and imagination, for instance, the memory of home alongside the imagination of home.

A thread throughout is the life of my father —  the home he lost as a child in wartime, and how that home lived on in his dreams.

Actually, what I hoped as I wrote the lecture, which is itself a form of narrative and storytelling, was that these ideas might transform before our very eyes, so that, over the course of an hour, we journey far together and arrive at another shore.

Perhaps, thanks to the painters and the lives we encounter on this voyage, we’ll never think of the imagination quite the same way again.

JG: In an age of distraction, why does the imagination still matter?

MT: I have come to think of imagination as a way to return us to the real, or to a reality that is a world shared between us.

As I wrote the lecture, I kept asking myself what it means to imagine, and how to recognize the moments when we slide into fantasy-unreality-forgetting.

What will keep us tethered to the real, to the common world, and to each other?

There must be something more than empathy and something more than knowing, because empathy and knowing have not stopped us from inflicting cruelties on one another.

Imagination has long been used to create enmity and to justify the unjustifiable. But it can also reveal our entangled histories, help us perceive the stranger in ourselves, and the beloved in another.

To imagine is also to re-see, to see again, to know that something more always lies beyond our momentary perceptions.

Pratt lecture

The E. J. Pratt Lecture is the oldest public lecture at Memorial University.

As part of Memorial’s centennial celebrations, Memorial University Press and Breakwater Books have collaborated to publish an anthology of 10 Pratt lectures (including Thien’s), edited by Department of English associate professor Dr. Andrew Loman.

“I think of the anthology as a 57-year-long collaboration between several generations of faculty in the Department of English,” said Dr. Loman. “The anthology only exists thanks to all that earlier work. And what’s particularly gratifying is how excellent the lectures are: they’re all brilliant in their respective ways. People will eat them up.”

Both the Thien lecture and the launch of The E. J. Pratt Lectures: 1968–2025, will take place on Monday, Nov. 10, at 8 p.m. at the LSPU Hall, 3 Victoria St., St. John’s.

Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.