Giller Prize 2020: Complete list of winners

The 2020 Giller Prize awarded its top fiction honor to Souvankham Thammavongsa’s luminous debut collection How to Pronounce Knife, marking a significant moment for the prestigious Canadian literary award. Thammavongsa’s spare, powerful stories center Lao-American voices and experiences that have long remained peripheral to mainstream North American literature, making her win a notable statement about whose stories the Giller Prize—and by extension, the broader literary establishment—chooses to celebrate and amplify.

What makes Thammavongsa’s victory particularly resonant is that she claimed the prize not with a novel, but with a collection of interconnected short fiction, a form that has struggled for recognition in recent years alongside the dominance of the novel in literary prizes. Her stories pivot between Laos and America, exploring displacement, identity, and the small, devastating moments of ordinary life with a prose style that’s both economical and deeply affecting. The 2020 Giller Prize, one of Canada’s most prestigious honors for English-language fiction, has long served as a bellwether for literary taste, and Thammavongsa’s win suggested the prize was ready to honor work that challenges conventional boundaries while centering marginalized perspectives.

Below you’ll find the complete list of honorees from this pivotal awards year.

Fiction

• How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa