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Michelle
Good

Michelle Good is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. Her debut novel, Five Little Indians, won a Governor General’s Literary Award, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Kobo Emerging Author Prize, and Canada Reads 2022. She is a finalist for the 2023 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy for Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada. Good lives in southern Saskatchewan.

Videos

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good, WT Fiction Prize finalist

Award History

2023 Finalist

Balsillie Prize for Public Policy
for Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada

Jury Citation

Truth Telling is a powerful, urgent, and necessary book that gets to the heart of true reconciliation and maps a course for achieving it. Bridging personal stories and lived experiences with sharp historical analysis, Michelle Good’s writing is both beautiful and heartbreaking. Honest, forthright, and powerful, Truth Telling offers insights and analysis that every policymaker and politician — indeed, any person who calls Canada “home” — can and must read. Urgently.”

—2023 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy Jury (Samantha Nutt, Taki Sarantakis, and Scott Young)

2020 Finalist

Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
for Five Little Indians

Jury Citation

“Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians poignantly underscores the tragedies and triumphs of residential school survival unlike any other Canadian novel. Through five profoundly intimate perspectives, Good skillfully details the brutality endured by Indigenous children at a British Columbia residential school and the complex ways trauma defines their adult lives. Like many survivors of this violent school system, they’re left on their own to heal in a hostile urban environment. Through heartache and hope, Good binds the five survivors together in an elaborate interconnected narrative of resilience. The result is unique portrayal of unvanquished Indigenous spirit rising above Canada’s shameful history.”

— 2020 WT Fiction Prize Jury (Elisabeth de Mariaffi, Waubgeshig Rice, and Yasuko Thanh)