Join us for an evening with Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa as she brings her debut novel, Pick a Colour (Knopf Canada) to Winnipeg. Featuring a reading and a conversation hosted by Lindsay Wong. Co-presented by McNally Robinson.
This event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a YouTube stream.
Pick a Colour is a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labour, and class. An intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don’t even know her true name.
Told over a single day, with razor-sharp precision and wit, the novel confirms Thammavongsa’s place as literature’s premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.
Souvankham Thammavongsa 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.
Host Lindsay Wong is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019. Her debut collection of short fiction, Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality was shortlisted for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. Her debut adult novel, Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies is forthcoming in January 2026. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. Follow her on Instagram, or visit her website.
Venue
McNally Robinson - Grant Park
- 1120 Grant Avenue