Michelle Good

Michelle Good is a Cree writer, poet, and lawyer from Canada, most noted for her debut novel Five Little Indians.^[1] She is a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan.^[2] Good has an MFA and a law degree from the University of British Columbia and, as a lawyer, advocated for residential-school survivors.^[3]

Early life and education[]

Good is a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation.^[4][5] Her great-grandmother participated in the 1885 uprising at Frog Lake and her uncle was Big Bear.^[4] Good graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative writing in 2014.^[5] The first draft of her debut novel, Five Little Indians, was her graduate thesis project.^[5]

Works[]

Five Little Indians[]

Five Little Indians is a story about five British Columbia residential-school survivors.^[6] Although the novel itself is fiction, some of the episodes were based on real experiences of her mother and grandmother, who were both survivors of Canada's residential school system.^[1] Published in 2020, the novel was longlisted for the Giller Prize^[7] and shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.^[8] Now listed it as one of the top 10 novels of 2020.^[9]

In 2021 the book won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2020 Governor General's Awards,^[10] the Amazon.ca First Novel Award,^[11] and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.^[12]

Poetry[]

• Defying Gravity published in Best Canadian Poetry 2016 and Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, A Tenth Anniversary Edition^[13]

Essays[]

• A Tradition Of Violence published in Keetsahnak, Our Sisters: Walking with Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit Peoples^[14]

References[]