Font size options
Increase or decrease the font size for this website by clicking on the 'A's.
Contrast options
Choose a color combination to give the most comfortable
contrast.
Author of Pick a Colour
Burlington Public Library is thrilled to welcome Souvankham Thammavongsa, recently honored with the 2025 Giller Prize for her debut novel Pick A Colour, an intimate and sharply written book and a revelatory examination of loneliness, love, labour, and class.
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.
Central Library is the largest location and houses historical and special collections, a computer lab, meeting rooms for public rental, and departments responsible for system-wide library services support. Burlington Public Library is a tax-supported registered charitable organization.
