Lao-Canadian writer becomes two-time winner of the Giller Literary Prize

Source:  Giller Prize

In an amazing second time win, Ms. Souvankham Thammavongsa has won the Giller Prize - a coveted Canadian Literary prize that was awarded on November 17, 2025.

She won for her novel entitled "Pick a Colour".  It was published in 2025 by Knopf Canada (owned by Penguin Random House) and released for sale on September 30, 2025.  ISBN:  9781039058453.

She last won this same award in 2020 for her other novel "How to Pronounce Knife".

The prize is worth CAD$100,000.

The Giller Prize press release describes it as being about:

"...a former boxer-turned-manicurist spends an ostensibly ordinary summer day at her salon, quietly navigating the tension between her outward anonymity and her sharp, deeply intelligent, inner life. In this exquisite novel, intelligence isn’t inherited through education, status, or privilege–it’s earned. With an inimitable style that decentralizes the English language, crackling wit, and profound confidence, author Souvankham Thammavongsa challenges our biases and insists that we never look at a nail salon, or its workers, the same way again. A master of form and restraint, Thammavongsa once again affirms her place as one of the most vital literary voices of our time."

Penguin Random House goes further:

"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 depth. 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 complicated 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."