![]() ![]() ![]() Enlisted to help, Joy’s father confidently asserts, “Kah-nnn-eye-ffff. The collection opens with its title story, “How to Pronounce Knife”, which follows a Laotian grade one student named Joy struggling with one particular word, ‘knife’, in her practice book. According to the 2016 Census of Canada, just under 25,000 people of Laotian ancestry live in Canada today. The stories are informed by Thammavongsa’s own experiences immigrating to Canada: she herself was born in a Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and, at the age of one, immigrated with her family to Toronto per a sponsorship program that the Canadian government enacted in July of 1979. Winner of the 2020 Giller Prize and the 2021 Trillium Book Award, the collection narrates the experiences of Lao immigrants as they orient themselves within Canada -many of these relating to their confrontations with the English language. How to Pronounce Knife is the debut short story collection of Canadian author - and already-established poet - Souvankham Thammavongsa. ![]()
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