The first thing that struck me about your writing was that it was devoid of embellishment and any kind of pretension. The author spoke to New Canadian Media’s Baisakhi Roy via an email interview, excerpts of which we are publishing below: Born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, she was raised and educated in Toronto, where she is currently working on her first novel.

Thammavongsa is also the author of four poetry books: Small Arguments (winner of the ReLit Award), Found, Light (winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry) and, most recently, Cluster. The title story was a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Recently the book was also named a finalist in the running for the 2021 Trillium Book Award. How to Pronounce Knife won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN/America Open Book Award. Thammavongsa’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Best American Non-Required Reading, The Journey Prize Stories, and The O. Everyone has a childhood, a family - everyone grows up but that doesn’t mean they write about it,” she says. What I find interesting, what I get excited about, the details of what I observe, what I pick and choose to put on the page. Each story in her collection offers the reader a glimpse into the day-to-day workings of immigrants and their families - their aspirations, their joys and their heartbreak.īut the author steers away from just talking about the immigrant struggle and the trauma of displacement, which is often a dominant narrative in stories about immigrants or by immigrant writers. Thammavongsa herself is a child of Laotian immigrants. In that moment, she takes a stand for her father, her family and, by extension, her culture and identity. “It’s in the front! The first one! It should have a sound!” she argues. Her classmates ridicule her, but Joy is insistent that her father is right: k in “knife” has to be pronounced. In that opening story, Joy, a Lao child who is learning to read, is told by her father that the word “knife” is pronounced kahneyff. So, I couldn’t help smiling when I read the title story in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s prize-winning collection of short stories, How to Pronounce Knife. “How to Pronounce Knife” is about “not wanting to fit in,” says author Souvankham Thammavongsa.

My dad and I always cracked up when he pronounced it daata instead of the North American day-ta because daata also happens to be the Bangla word for “drumstick,” a necessary ingredient in some of the most delicious curries known to humankind. “Almond,” “asthma,” “data” - growing up in a Bengali family in Mumbai, India, I was aware that some family members always pronounced those words exactly as they looked, articulating the “l” in “almond” and the “sth” in “asthma.” “Data” was the funniest.

How to pronounce knife book review