Brian Thomas Isaac’s newest book, Bones of a Giant, is a haunting and tender return to the Okanagan Indian Reserve and a powerful story of struggle and redemption. Brian will be in conversation with fellow author Daniel Heath Justice.
Brian Thomas Isaac was born in 1950 on the Okanagan Indian Reserve, near Vernon, BC. After completing grade eight, he found work in the Alberta oil fields and in construction, eventually retiring as a bricklayer. He came to writing late in life. In 2022, his bestselling debut, All the Quiet Places, won an Indigenous Voices Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and CBC’s Canada Reads. He lives with his wife in West Kelowna, BC.
Daniel Heath Justice is a Colorado-born citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a Spears-Foreman-Riley descendant. He is Professor of Critical Indigenous Studies and English and a Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia on unceded and occupied Musqueam territory. His research extends from Cherokee literary and cultural history and Indigenous literary expression more generally, to literary considerations of other-than-human kinship, speculative fiction, Indigiqueer belonging and animal studies. His fully revised twentieth-anniversary edition of Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, is forthcoming in December, with an updated focused on Cherokee citizenship and sovereignty.
