BC Libraries Present: Indigenous Fiction | Alicia Elliott: And Then She Fell

BC Libraries Present is a virtual author series that brings exciting conversations to library users in every corner of British Columbia. For the first event of this fall lineup, join Alicia Elliott in conversation with award-winning author Carleigh Baker.

Following the success of her groundbreaking memoir A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Alicia Elliot’s new novel And Then She Fell has quickly become an award-winning national bestseller. It’s a story about Native life, motherhood, and mental health that follows a young Mohawk woman who discovers that the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences.

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Alicia Elliott (she/her) is a Mohawk writer and editor living in Brantford, Ontario. She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt, and many others. She’s had numerous essays nominated for National Magazine Awards, winning gold in 2017 and an honorable mention in 2020. Her short fiction was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2018, Best Canadian Stories 2018, and The Journey Prize Stories 30. Alicia was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada. It was also nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and won the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award. Her first novel, And Then She Fell, won the Indigenous Voices Award winner, the Amazon First Novel Award, and was named a Globe and Mail and CBC Best Book of the Year in 2023.

Carleigh Baker (she/her) is an author and teacher of nêhiyaw âpihtawikosisân (Cree-Métis) and European descent. Born and raised on Stó:lō territory, she currently lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwəta (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings, won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Indigenous Voices Award for fiction. Her short stories and essays have been translated into several languages and anthologized in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Her newest collection, Last Woman, was featured on the CBC Books 2024 summer reading list.

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This series is a project of BC’s public library federations, coordinated by Public Library InterLink, with the generous financial support of the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Municipal Affairs.