"On the Move" is a series of interviews with writers traveling with the IWP on various study and reading projects. Madeleine Thien is here interviewed on the tour "Writers in Motion 2011: Decline and Recovery." The blog documenting it is at http://writersinmotion.blogspot.com. Madeleine Thien is the author of Simple Recipes, a collection of stories, and Certainty, a novel, which was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize and won the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Walrus, Five Dials, Brick, and the Asia Literary Review, and been translated into sixteen languages. In 2010 she received the Ovid Festival Prize, awarded to an international writer of promise. A novel, Dogs at the Perimeter, is forthcoming in 2011. The series is produced by the IWP at the University of Iowa, and is made possible by a grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Video producer: Sahar Sharkar