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Author of Pick a Colour
Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa discusses Pick a Colour, her revelatory debut novel about loneliness, love, labour, and class. This intimate and sharply written book follows a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don't even know her true name.
In Pick a Colour, Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. 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 Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.
A Different Drummer Books will be on site with books for sale and signing after the talk.
Presented in partnership with Knopf Canada and A Different Drummer Books
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.
Explore Souvankham Thammavongsa in our collection
If you need an accessibility accommodation during this program, please register early so we can confirm arrangements a few days before your visit.
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