Michelle Good has moved and inspired millions of people with Five Little Indians, which chronicles the desperate quest of a group of residential school survivors to come to terms with their past and find a way forward. The novel won Canada Reads, a Governor General’s Literary Award, an Amazon First Novel Award, a Kobo Emerging Author Prize, and was a Giller finalist (and the list continues). She joins us to speak about her new non-fiction work, Truth Telling, continuing her essential messages through essays exploring the historical and contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada. She speaks to ways we can acknowledge the past and understand the way forward; a national conversation we must continue—and loudly—in months and years to come. Moderated by Carleigh Baker.
Presented in partnership with Talking Stick Festival, HarperCollins Canada Ltd, and the Peter A. Allard Law School at UBC.
Event Participants:
MICHELLE GOOD is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After three decades of working with Indigenous communities and organizations, she obtained her law degree. She earned her MFA in creative writing at UBC while still practising law. Her novel, Five Little Indians, was nominated for the Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It received the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Five Little Indians was also chosen for Canada Reads 2022. Michelle Good’s poems, short stories and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada.
CARLEIGH BAKER is an nêhiyaw âpihtawikosisân /Icelandic writer who lives as a guest on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwu7mesh, and səl̓ilwəta peoples. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Essays, The Short Story Advent Calendar, and The Journey Prize Stories. She also writes reviews for the Globe and Mail and the Literary Review of Canada. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings (Anvil, 2017) won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Award, the Emerging Indigenous Voices Award for fiction, and the BC Book Prize Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award.
