Michelle Good

Michelle Good is an award-winning Cree writer and member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan.

After working for Indigenous organizations for twenty-five years, she obtained a law degree and advocated for residential school survivors for over fourteen years. Good earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia while still practising law and managing her own law firm. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada, and her poetry was included on two lists of the best Canadian poetry in 2016 and 2017. 

Good received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Simon Fraser University in 2022 and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of the Fraser Valley in 2024.

Five Little Indians, her first novel, won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the Evergreen Award, the City of Vancouver Book of the Year Award, and Canada Reads 2022. It was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes.  

Her new work, Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous life in Canada was released May 30, 2023, and on October 4 2023 was shortlisted for the Writers Trust Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. In May 2024 Truth Telling was shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Awards, the Indigenous Voices Award and the High Plains Book Award.