Skip to content

Michelle
Good

Michelle Good is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. She obtained her law degree from UBC after three decades of working with Indigenous communities and organizations. Good’s 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. It was also shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada. Good lives in southern Saskatchewan.

Videos

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good, WT Fiction Prize finalist

Award History

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)

Works recognized by WT