Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Naujaat, Nunavut, Canada
About Michael Kusugak
- Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak (Inuktitut: ?????? ????) is a storyteller and a Canadian children's writer, who tells stories about Arctic and Inuit culture.
- He was born April 27, 1948 just north of Chesterfield Inlet, at a point of land we call Qatiktalik (known as Cape Fullterton in English).
- That same spring of 1948 he and his family moved to Repulse Bay and in 1960 to Rankin Inlet.
- In 2019, he lives in Sooke, BC and plans to move to Manitoba in the summer.
- In 1954, a plane arrived and at the age of six Michael Kusugak and many of his friends were sent away to residential school.
- The teachers were strict and did not allow the children to speak their own language, Inuktitut.
- Kusugak remembers sitting in the back of the class crying most of the time.
- The following year, Michael successfully hid when the plane came to take him and his friends away again.
- However, he returned the following year and became one of the first Inuit in the eastern Arctic to graduate from high school.
- He was also educated in Yellowknife, Churchill and Saskatoon.
- He has later worked as an educational administrator for Nunavut Arctic College.
- Michael Kusugak grew up living a traditional, nomadic Inuit life with his family.
- Every night, Michael pleaded with his grandmother to tell him a story, until she eventually gave in.
- In this environment, Michael’s love of storytelling was born.
- It wasn’t until Michael had his own children that he realized that there was hardly anything written for children about life in the Arctic, so he started telling them his grandmother’s stories.
- In the late 1980s, Robert Munsch visited a local school and stayed in the Kusugak household.
- Along with Munsch as a co-author, Michael wrote his first book, A Promise is a Promise, published in 1988.
- Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak has been writing ever since.
- His books have been published in French, Korean, Japanese and Braille.All of Kusugak's books, except for T is for Territories, which is part of a non-fiction series, are illustrated by Vladyana Krykorka.
- Krykorka came to Toronto from Prague when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.
- She illustrated A Promise is a Promise in 1988, and since then has been to Nunavut many times to visit, photograph and paint the land and people.
- She has also written and illustrated a set of her own books depicting the land and animals of the north: Arctic Land, Arctic Sea, and Arctic Sky.
- Ijiraq, a moon of Saturn, was named by astronomer John J.
- Kavelaars after encountering the term in one of Kusugak's books.
Read more at Wikipedia