Michel Jean always wanted to be a novelist, so much so that childhood friends remember him talking about this ambition as a young teen. But he was savvy enough to know that he would need a day job to support his writing habit, so he became a broadcast journalist and built a career at high profile French-language outlets such as CBC/Radio-Canada and TVA. He figured that he’d get around to writing eventually, when the time was right.

“Then one day I was 40 years old – I was working for Radio-Canada at that time – it was seven o’clock at night, and I was alone at the station for the shoot I was working with,” Jean says. “I said, ‘Gee, I never wrote, it never happened.’ So I thought maybe that was something that, you know, when you’re a kid, you think you’re going to do, but life goes on another path.”

Of course, Jean’s life didn’t wind up staying on that other path; he has since published 13 books (the first, Envoyé spécial in 2008) and has been honoured as both a Chevalier of L’Ordre national du Québec and a Chevalier of l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République française. He has also won numerous awards, including the Prix littéraire France-Québec for Kukum, a fictionalized account of his great-grandmother’s life (published in 2019 by Libre Expression), that in 2021 sold more copies than any other novel in his home province after winning le Combat national des livres. His work has been translated into many languages, including Italian, German, and Spanish – and now English, with translations by Susan Ouriou for House of Anansi Press.

Kukum was published in English by Anansi in 2023, for which Ouriou was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for translation. Two anthologies of Indigenous stories edited by Jean, and translated by Kathryn Gabinet-Kroo, Amun and Wapke, were published in 2020 and 2022 by Exile Editions.

Jean grew up in Alma, Quebec, in an Innu family with roots in the Mashteuiatsh reserve in the Saguenay–Lac-St-Jean region, though for many years he kept this part of himself separate from his public persona. He wasn’t ashamed of who he was, but he worried that being open about his Indigenous identity would negatively impact his career due to racism or a perception of journalistic bias when covering Indigenous stories; he told himself that life was difficult enough without adding more challenges.

Then his grandmother died, and he found himself longing to reconnect with the community in Mashteuiatsh – and, ultimately, to reconnect with himself. Around the same time, someone sent him an image of his first three books – which didn’t touch on Indigenous culture – on display in a school library in Pessamit, another Innu reserve, with the words “Michel Jean, Innu Writer” above them. He thought about what it would have meant to him to see someone celebrated as an Innu author when he was a child.

“So I said to myself, maybe you could stop thinking about how people are going to react, or what they’re going to say, and [take this as inspiration] to do it.”

And so Jean wrote Atuk (originally published as Elle et nous in 2012), the novel in which he first publicly disclosed his Innu identity. Since then, many of his novels have centred on Indigenous characters and experiences.

In spite of publishing French-language novels on a near yearly basis, it took a while for Jean’s work to be nominated for many of Quebec’s major literary awards – in part, he says, because in the province’s mainstream francophone literary scene, Indigenous literature often isn’t viewed as Québécois. Even Kukum, which has won or been a runner-up for seven awards, had a non-traditional route to the Prix littéraire France-Québec. The prize, which is awarded every year to a Quebec novel, involves books being nominated by Quebec booksellers and then voted on by librarians and readers in France. But Kukum was submitted by the director of the prize herself, who lives in France but is originally from Quebec; she picked the book up on a whim while visiting the province and then was captivated by the story. So while Kukum has since become a bestseller in Quebec, it found its first big success overseas.

One of Jean’s strengths is the variation in his storytelling – each of his novels is written in a different style, with protagonists all over the spectrum of age and gender, and it’s a credit to his talent that he’s able to move so fluidly from one subject to another. Kukum is the account of an old woman looking back on her life as a white orphan who left her aunt and uncle’s farm to marry an Innu man and live in the bush. Ninan: Tiohtiá:ke, Montreal, published in French in 2021, and in English this fall (Sept. 15) under the Arachnide Editions imprint, centres on the lives of Indigenous people living on the streets of Montreal, and the community they build there in an uncaring – and sometimes hostile – environment. Qimmik (2023) and Kabasa (2025), which are set to be published by House of Anansi Press in the next few years, take place respectively in an Inuit community in the Far North and Sri Lanka at the time of the 2004 tsunami. Each novel is a complete departure from the last.

As for his success in countries where people are less familiar with Indigenous experiences in Canada, Jean attributes it to the fact that a good story is a good story. For example, his novel Le vent en parle encore, which is about residential schools, has sold well in both Germany and Italy, even though he sees it as a “hyper-local” Canadian story. “I think that with literature, you can take difficult subjects and interest anybody [in] it,” Jean says. He also believes that the francophone literary landscape in Quebec has been evolving over the past few years, and is now more dynamic and inclusive than before.

But while Jean is gratified by his success in Europe, his books appearing in translation here at home is even more exciting.

“[Being published] in English, and in Canada, which is my country … it’s something special for me. I was happy to work with House of Anansi, with an editor [Leslie Ahenda] for whom I have a lot of admiration – that was the most important thing, I wanted to work with people that I admired and respected.”