Five minutes with 2025 Giller winner Souvankham Thammavongsa

On Monday night, Souvankham Thammavongsa walked out of the Park Hyatt hotel $100,000 richer after winning Canada’s most remunerative literary award, the Giller Prize. It was her second time receiving the honour in just five years: in 2020, she won for her short story collection How to Pronounce Knife.

Thammavongsa’s winning novel, Pick a Colour, is one of the year’s buzziest books. A sparse fictional account of a day in the life of Ning, a nail salon owner and technician, it explores the manicurist’s rich inner world, dark wit and personal history as a boxer. All the while, the protagonist stays busy filing, painting and massaging the hands and feet of clients who remain unaware of the depths of her interiority.

Thammavongsa won the Giller over fellow nominees Emma Donoghue, Eddy Boudel Tan, Emma Knight and Mona Awad. In her acceptance speech, the daughter of Laotian refugees recounted printing her own books as a child and selling them to adults at farmers’ markets out of her school knapsack. “Thank you to anyone who has ever bought a book that I made,” she said. We spoke with Thammavongsa shortly after she learned she’d won.

I saw some tears after your name was announced. What was your first thought? When you win, everybody sees the polished version of your work, but nobody really sees the difficult choices that went into making it. I was thinking about all the decisions I’d made in the margins that nobody saw.

What kinds of difficult decisions came to mind? When an editor would tell me to open up a scene or to take something away or to use a different word. I made a lot of atmospheric decisions about how certain sentences should sound, figuring out which spaces not to fill and which spaces to fill.

You’re now one of an exclusive group of writers, including Esi Edugyan and Alice Munro, who have won the Giller twice. I still can’t believe it. The first time was surreal, and now…I mean, is it even real?

What does winning this prize mean for your future? It means that I’m not a one-trick pony.

Everyone knows about method acting, but to create Pick a Colour, you tried method writing, taking boxing classes for a year to get inside your protagonist’s head. How come? Any time you’re writing about something, you should know it on a technical level. Boxing literature is steeped in history, and a lot of it is written by real boxers or the people who surround the ring. I couldn’t have just used my imagination to portray the experience of being a boxer—I really had to know it physically.

You’ve said that this book is about “the celebration and joy and happiness of choosing for yourself and being alone and content as a woman in her mid-40s.” What do you make of the recent “having a boyfriend is embarrassing” discourse? Oh, that was hilarious. I think being alone encourages us to look for magic, and if we don’t find it, to be happy. Being by yourself can be magic in itself.

Did you paint your nails for the occasion? Yes, they’re light pink.

What inspired the choice? I didn’t want the colour to stand out. It’s very minimalist, just like my writing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.