Souvankham Thammavongsa’s novel, Pick a Colour, has been longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize.

Souvankham 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.

What’s the first piece of writing you had published?

I think it was something from grade six. We wrote about our memories of elementary school because we were all headed to middle school later that year. My teacher chose three pieces, and mine was one of them. Hold on, let me go find it and type it out here:

“In Kindergarten, I met two friends I like, Grace and Gayatri. In grade one, I met Zevart. They helped me go through cloudy days. In grade four, our class went fishing and it was really FUN! I shared my rod with Gayatri. Zevart couldn’t go fishing. We saw a frog. Grace was there too, fishing with her friend. Gayatri and I were fishing when all of a sudden our rod fell apart. We asked a lady if she could get it for us when it fell into the water. She tried but the water was too deep. She told us to reel it in. It was so fun. I will never have a better time. I guess that’s the way life is.”

As you can see, I was developing my style and voice. Plain, simple, clear. No romanticizing, not being understood.

When did you first come up with the idea for your book?

After I finished writing How to Pronounce Knife, I was obsessed with the story I wrote in it titled “Mani Pedi.” I wanted to continue writing it and the novel became a spinoff from that. I was already thinking of what I was doing with language in that collection. I was thinking of the silence in the word “knife.” A single letter was silent in that story, but the child and father didn’t care. They have their own language and maybe it’s wrong to other people, but to them it’s their language and they are going to say it that way.

In Pick a Colour, an entire language is silent except for two moments when they are heard saying “whoa, whoa” and “yoo-hoo.” It asks you to pretend the English language right in front of you is not there.

I continue thinking about intelligence and knowledge—how they are not the same thing. Knowledge you can get. You read a book, you go to school, you can pay for it. But intelligence is a lot more valuable—it’s what you do with the knowledge you have however grand or little it is. Intelligence has to do with your personal character, build, the way you take in the world. You don’t have to be a professor, a writer, or artist to be seen thinking on the page. You can be a nail salon worker and you can read an environment, a person, a situation, and think too.

Which authors or books inspired your book?

I didn’t know what to do with sound—how it exists in a space like a room and then how we move closer to have an intimate conversation. My ear does this for me on its own, but I didn’t know how to tune sound like this on a page. I read The Great Gatsby for that. It’s so good at describing parties and secret whispered conversations. Narrative direction like who said what and what they did with their eyes and hands, how they leaned, where they looked in the room is so beautifully written and meaningful in that book. Most writers just write “he said” and add “and then.” It is serviceable, but I don’t write like that.

What advice would you have for someone struggling to make time to write?

I would not worry about this. It is not a real thing.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

It is never a one-time thing to know. It is a question I carry all the time. When I was younger, I wanted to be a writer because it seemed cheap. You just get a pen and paper and spend all day making things up. When I heard a song, I loved that I had no life experience but I could be made to feel life. I remember singing “Margaritaville” in grade six because my teacher only knew how to play that song on his guitar and we were all just belting out the line IT’S MY OWN DAMN FAULT. Everyone else was singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “It’s a Small World After All.” When the finished copies of Pick a Colour arrived in the mail, I sat down and read it like a reader. And I was like DAMN, I WANT TO DO THIS AGAIN!!!

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