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Souvankham Thammavongsa won the $100,000 Giller Prize for Pick a Colour, a debut novel about a boxer-turned-manicurist.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
Laotian-Canadian poet Souvankham Thammavongsa has won the $100,000 Giller Prize for the best Canadian fiction of the year, prevailing over four other finalists with Pick a Colour, a debut novel about a boxer-turned-manicurist.
The Toronto writer, who won the Giller prize in 2020 for her debut short-story collection How to Pronounce Knife, accepted this year’s prize at a gala ceremony in Toronto on Monday.
“I never knew that I could make more money than a baseball player,” Ms. Thammavongsa joked as she began her acceptance speech. It was a reference to Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Trey Yesavage’s prorated salary of US$57,204 for his late-season heroics. Host Rick Mercer had quipped that the Giller winner would earn more than the phenom ballplayer.
“When I was a kid, I didn’t know how to become a writer,” Ms. Thammavongsa continued, nervously. “My mom and dad are not writers. I printed and bound my own books, sold them out of my school knapsack on front lawns at farmers markets and at small press fairs. Thank you to anyone who has ever bought a book that I made.”
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Pick a Colour takes place over the course of a single day.Gerald Lynch/Supplied
Published by Knopf Canada, Pick a Colour is a story about a nail salon owner who toils away for the privileged clients who don’t even know her real name. The novel begins with an uncomfortable opening line: “Everyone is ugly. I should know. I look at people all day.”
In its citation, the Giller jury said the book “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, Ms. Thammavongsa once again affirms her place as one of the most vital literary voices of our time.”
Invite-only guests dined in the Park Hyatt Toronto ballroom knowing the future of the country’s most prestigious and richest literary prize is uncertain. The Giller Foundation has said it will be forced to shut down at the end of this year unless it receives federal funding.
Pick a Colour takes place over the course of a single day. Earlier this month, Ms. Thammavongsa talked to The Globe about that choice: “In the publishing world right now, when you’re a writer of colour, you’re supposed to write these epic novels that try to address the question, ‘Where are you from?’ You go back generations to explain how we got here. I made this story happen over one day; I’m not going to explain where I come from.”
Ms. Thammavongsa‘s novel prevailed over We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad, The Tiger and the Cosmonaut by Eddy Boudel Tan, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight and The Paris Express by four-time nominee Emma Donoghue.
Each of the runners-up received $10,000. Four of the five shortlisted novels − all except Mr. Tan’s The Tiger and the Cosmonaut − are national bestsellers, making this year’s field one of the most populist in the prize’s 31-year history.
“These are wildly accessible, highly readable books that lack nothing in literary value but pack the solid punch of chart toppers,” Giller executive director Elana Rabinovitch told The Globe before the ceremony. “One criticism that’s been levelled at us over the years, much like the Booker Prize, is that the judges’ picks are too highbrow, too arcane. This year’s jury blew that up.”
The jury was composed of Loghan Paylor, Deepa Rajagopalan and jury chair Dionne Irving. Fellow Canadian authors Jordan Abel and Aaron Tucker were named to the jury but subsequently withdrew, citing ethical reasons related to Giller’s association with its former title sponsor, Bank of Nova Scotia. The bank’s subsidiary 1832 Asset Management was at one point the biggest international investor in Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems Ltd.
The last time Mr. Mercer emceed the Gillers was in 2023, when the ceremony was interrupted by anti-Israel protesters who jumped onstage carrying signs that read “Scotiabank Funds Genocide.” The comedian attempted to rip one of them from a protester’s hands.
Previous Giller-winning books include Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version, Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman, Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs, Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter, and last year’s winner, Anne Michaels’s Held.
