Thursday, January 7, 2021
7:00-8:00pm
Described by CBC as “one of the most striking voices of her generation,” Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut book of fiction, How to Pronounce Knife, has deservedly won international acclaim. Meet Souvankham as she reads from her award winning book, and engages in a candid discussion on her writing with award winning author and associate professor of English Literature, Vinh Nguyen.
Souvankham Thammavongsa’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Granta, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Journey Prize Stories, and O. Henry Prize Stories. Her debut book of fiction, How to Pronounce Knife, is the winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and is one of Time’s Must-Read Books of 2020. Thammavongsa is also the author of four poetry books: Light, winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry; Found; Small Arguments, winner of the ReLit Award; and, most recently, Cluster. Born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, she was raised and educated in Toronto, where she now lives.
Vinh Nguyen is an Associate Professor of English at Renison University College, University of Waterloo, where he specializes in critical refugee studies, Asian diasporic literature and culture, and critical race studies. He is working on a manuscript entitled Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience, and is in the process of co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives. He also curates “Scatterings,” an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing for the literary magazine The New Quarterly. In 2017, he was the recipient of the John C. Polanyi Prize in Literature. His writing can be found in Social Text, MELUS, ARIEL, Canadian Literature, Life Writing, and Canadian Review of American Studies.
