One Day Wonder: Souvankham Thammavongsa & Kate Cayley
Lakefield College School Bryan Jones Theatre
Saturday, July 18 @ 3:00 pm
What can a single day reveal? New novels by Souvankham Thammavongsa and Kate Cayley tackle the complex inner lives, connections, and conflicts of, respectively, nail salon workers and residents of a Toronto neighbourhood.
In conversation with Charlie Foran
Souvankham Thammavongsa
Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four poetry books and the short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Granta. Pick a Colour, her first novel, won the 2025 Giller Prize.
Pick a Colour offers a wry glimpse into the life of a salon, narrated by its owner, Ning over the course of a business day. Souvankham Thammavongsa peels back the veneer of the transactional world of commerce to reveal labour conditions, class hierarchies, cultural divides, and the ultimate value of intimacy. Pick a Colour is a brilliant and subtle novel that leaves the reader with many well-considered options rather than a few straightforward answers.
Kate Cayley
Kate Cayley is a fiction writer, poet, and playwright who has published two short story collections and three collections of poetry in addition to Property, her first novel. Her plays have been performed in Canada, the US and the UK, and her awards include the Trillium Book Award, the Mitchell Prize for Poetry and the O. Henry Prize. She lives in Toronto.
Set over the course of a single day in an “up-and-coming” Toronto neighbourhood, Kate Cayley’s Property follows the inner lives of interconnected residents as they stumble through their errands, with each seemingly inconsequential exchange tightening until finally tragedy strikes, leaving the neighbourhood forever changed. Property is “an unflinching tale of a community’s fragile bonds,” according to Publishers Weekly.
Charlie Foran
Charlie Foran is an award-winning writer of fiction, nonfiction and journalism and has written and presented documentaries for radio and TV. He has served as president of PEN Canada and Executive Director of Writers’ Trust of Canada. He is a senior fellow at Massey College and teaches at the University of Toronto. Member of the Order of Canada, he was awarded the Writers’ Trust Fellowship for his contributions to Canadian literature. He lives in Port Hope.