This is the 24th year of Canada Reads, an annual series of debates, broadcast on CBC Radio One, in which five Canadian personalities each champion a different Canadian book. Through a series of five episodes, the panelists will whittle the shortlist of five books down to a single publication, which will then be celebrated as a book that all Canadians should read.
Professor Liew’s book will be championed by pastry chef Saïd M’Dahoma, a former neuroscientist who became a pastry chef, and who now shares his creations on social media as The Pastry Nerd.
In Dandelion, Lily, a new mother, becomes obsessed with uncovering the mystery of her own mother’s disappearance. In a quest for answers, she journeys from a small British Columbia mining town to Southeast Asia, following in her mother’s footsteps, all the while reexamining her sense of belonging. The novel is informed by Professor Liew’s own life, as well as her research on the issue of statelessness. A stateless person is someone who doesn’t have citizenship anywhere, in any form. Like Lily, Professor Liew’s own parents immigrated to Canada from Brunei, and, like Lily, her own father was not granted citizenship when he was born in Brunei, leaving him stateless. While there are shared details between the author and the protagonist, the novel is not autobiographical, but is rather inspired by Professor Liew’s deep consideration of the effects of statelessness, the experiences of immigrants, and the elusiveness of a sense of belonging.
In 2018, the novel, then an unpublished manuscript, was awarded the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award for fiction by the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, which praised Professor Liew’s elegant prose and storytelling for evoking a “literary reflection of Canadian migration, identity, and statelessness”.
In addition to its central place in the novel, the topic of statelessness is also front and centre in Professor Liew’s cutting-edge research. In 2024, she published Ghost Citizens: Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law (Fernwood Publishing), which defines statelessness as an important area of immigration, refugee and citizenship law. While statelessness affects millions of people around the world, marginalizing and oppressing them in numerous ways, previous academic treatments of the topic have been focused on legal reform. While legal scholarship has been able to identify gaps in citizenship law, the problem of statelessness persists. Solutions on paper have not translated into action in the real world. With Ghost Citizens, Professor Liew explores why it is that stateless people are still unable to resolve their citizenship problems.
Moderated by Ali Hassan, Canada Reads will be broadcast on CBC Radio One beginning on March 17, running daily at 10:00 a.m. until March 20.
Congratulations to Professor Liew on this amazing achievement!