
Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four acclaimed poetry books, and the short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller prize, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN/America Open Book Award, out now with McClelland & Stewart (Canada), Little, Brown (U.S.), and Bloomsbury (U.K.), available in French, with foreign rights sold in China, Korea, and Turkey. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, and NOON. Thammavongsa is a judge for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize. She was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand and was raised and educated in Toronto.