A Toronto novelist has become the fourth Canadian writer to become a repeat winner of Canada’s most lucrative literary award. Souvankham Thammavongsa received $100,000 and a two-week residency at the Banff Centre as this year’s Giller Prize honouree. She won for Pick a Colour, which is about a retired boxer named Ning who works as a nail salon manager where all the employees are given the name “Susan”.
The novel about loneliness, love, labour, and class unfolds over a single day.
CBC broadcast the Giller Award ceremony, which was hosted by Rick Mercer. The four other books on the Giller Prize shortlist were Mona Awad’s We Love You, Bunny; Eddy Boudel Tabn’s The Tiger and the Cosmonaut; Emma Donoghue’s The Paris Express; and Emma Knight’s The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus.
“In PICK A COLOUR, a former boxer-turned-manicurist spends an ostensibly ordinary summer day at her salon, quietly navigating the tension between her outward anonymity and her sharp, deeply intelligent, inner life. In this exquisite novel, intelligence isn’t inherited through… pic.twitter.com/mIPdYo7dFV
— Giller Prize (@GillerPrize) November 16, 2025
Thammavongsa won her first Giller Prize in 2020 for How to Pronounce Knife. It also won the 2021 Trillium Book Awards and was a finalist for the national Book Critics Circle Award and PEN America Open Book Award. In addition, Thammavongsa has won an O Henry Award for her stories. She was born in a Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand.
The other two-time Giller Prize winners are Esi Edugyan, M.G. Vassanji, and Alice Munro.
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