Page 47 - Trillium Book Awards 2021, ONTARIO CREATES

Trillium Book Award
Finalist
Souvankham Thammavongsa
How to Pronounce Knife
McClelland & Stewart
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 belong. 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.
Tender, uncompromising, and fiercely alive, How to Pronounce Knife establishes Souvankham Thammavongsa as one of the most striking voices of her generation.
Souvankham Thammavongsa’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, The Atlantic,
The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Best American Non-Required Reading, The Journey Prize Stories, and
The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her debut book of fiction, How to Pronounce Knife, is the winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN America Open Book Award, and the Danuta Gleed Award, and one of Time’s Must-Read Books of 2020. The title story was a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Thammavongsa is also the author of four poetry books: Light, winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry; Found; Small Arguments, winner of the ReLit Award; and, most recently, Cluster. Born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, she was raised and educated in Toronto, where she is at work on her first novel.
Jury comment: How to Pronounce Knife is a beautiful collection of short stories that are captivating, funny, quirky, filled with love – and, yes, sometimes sad. Be prepared to be transported by the author’s nuanced observations – of a former boxer turned manicurist, a mother and daughter picking worms at night, or a family’s methods of communicating or demonstrating their love, the father
taking on the garb of a new country singer his wife is enamoured with. This astounding collection’s fourteen stories cover family, food, music, work, and friendship from the specific lens of Laotian immigrants in a new
and sometimes confusing land, yet Thammavongsa’s talent and
pervading empathy make their experiences familiar to everyone.
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Photo Credit: Sarah Bodri