Michelle Good among Canadian winners of 2024 High Plains Book Awards
CBC Books | Posted: October 16, 2024 4:54 PM | Last Updated: October 16
The awards recognize regional literary works about life on the High Plains in North America
Canada Reads-winning author Michelle Good is among the Canadian writers to take home a 2024 High Plains Book Award.
Established in 2006, the annual awards recognize regional authors and/or literary works that examine and reflect life on the High Plains in North America. The regions include the Canadian provinces Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan and the American States of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas.
The award program recognizes books in 13 categories, including nonfiction, fiction, poetry, children's books, photography and short stories.
The award winners each receive $500 and a commemorative plaque.
Good won the Indigenous writer category for her book Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada.
In Truth Telling, Good explores many issues that are currently affecting Indigenous people in Canada while incorporating her own experience and family's legacy in seven personal essays.
She contextualizes contemporary discussions about reconciliation, the emergence of Indigenous narratives and more through historical knowledge, essentially providing a resource to mobilize Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians alike into active change.
Good is a Cree writer and retired lawyer, as well as a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. Five Little Indians, her first book, won the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award.
It also won Canada Reads 2022, when it was championed by Ojibway fashion journalist Christian Allaire.
LISTEN | Michelle Good discusses her essay collection Truth Telling:
Calgary-based high school student Charlotte Bellows also won a prize: the First Book award. She is recognized for her memoir The Definition of Beautiful that follows her own coming-of-age story. Between the ages of 15 and 17, she recovered from an eating disorder. The book explores this journey along with all the consequences it had brought into her life with the added difficulty of living through a global pandemic.
American Canadian writer and technology reporter Vauhini Vara won the short story prize for her collection This is Salvaged, which offers an intimate portrayal of grief and girlhood. It examines the lives of girls and women experiencing loss and alienation.
LISTEN | Vauhini Vara on exploring the lives of girls and women experiencing loss:
Here is the full list of Canadian winners:
First Book
Indigenous Writer
Short Stories
- This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara
Young Reader/Middle Grade
- Coyote Queen by Jessica Vitalis
Art & Photography
- Prairie Interlace by Michele Hardy, Timothy Long, and Julia Krueger
Visit the High Plains Book Awards' website for the full list of winners.