Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four poetry books and the short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Granta. Pick a Colour is her first novel.
“Only as masterful an ironist as Souvankham Thammavongsa could have pulled this off: a work of urgent and impassioned solidarity that is also a defiant, even pugnacious, assertion of narrative autonomy and technical control.” –Eleanor Catton (Birnam Wood)
A revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labour, and class. An intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don’t even know her true name.
Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer’s day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound complexity. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complex power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.
As the day’s work grinds on, the friction between Ning’s two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning. Told over a single day, with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Colour confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa’s place as literature’s premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.
A young man painting nails at the local salon. A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant. A father who packs furniture to move into homes he’ll never afford. A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas. In her stunning Giller Prize-winning debut book of fiction, Souvankham Thammavongsa focuses on characters struggling to make a living, illuminating their hopes, disappointments, love affairs, acts of defiance, and above all their pursuit of a place to make their own. In spare, intimate prose charged with emotional power and a sly wit, she paints an indelible portrait of watchful children, wounded men, and restless women caught between cultures, languages, and values. As one of Thammavongsa’s characters says, “All we wanted was to live.” And in these stories, they do—brightly, ferociously, unforgettably.
A daughter becomes an unwilling accomplice in her mother’s growing infatuation with country singer Randy Travis. A former boxer finds a chance at redemption while working at his sister’s nail salon. A school bus driver must grapple with how much he’s willing to give up in order to belong. And in the title story, a young girl’s unconditional love for her father transcends language.
Tender, uncompromising, and fiercely alive, How to Pronounce Knife establishes Souvankham Thammavongsa as one of the most important voices of her generation.
“In 1978, my parents lived in building #48. Nong Khai, Thailand, a Lao refugee camp. My father kept a scrapbook filled with doodles, addresses, postage stamps, maps, measurements. He threw it out and when he did, I took it and found this.”
Built out of doodles, diagrams, and drawings, this is a work characterized by the elegance and power of its bareness. These poems use blank spaces and small print. Their language is exquisitely precise in detail, and every letter, gesture, break, line, and shape becomes a place of real meaning. Here, the intention is to let us see, as well as to hold back much of what we see.
First published in 2007, Souvankham Thammavongsa’s remarkable second collection was acclaimed for its originality and cemented her reputation as a poet with a rare, astonishing gift.
Starring E. Jean Carroll, Cherie Dimaline, Tracey Lindberg, Linden MacIntyre, David A. Robertson, Shelagh Rogers, Saeed Teebi & Souvankam Thammavongsa. Hosted by Pam Rocker
Starring Souvankham Thammavongsa & katherena vermette
Hosted by David A. Robertson
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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