'You feel kind of embarrassed to put yourself up on a pedestal.'

When the phone call came telling Michael Kusugak he'd won a $20,000 prize, he thought it was a scam.

But it turns out the Vicky Metcalf award for children's literature is very real: it's given annually to a Canadian children's writer for a lifetime body of work. Past winners include Farley Mowat, Dennis Lee, Robert Munsch and Kenneth Oppel.

The honour has left the Rankin Inlet writer both bursting with pride and a little sheepish too.

"In Inuit culture you feel kind of embarrassed to put yourself up on a pedestal," Kusugak said over coffee at an Iqaluit hotel last week.

"I have this feeling like I am the greatest and I'm kind of embarrassed about that thought."

Kusugak arrived on the literary scene in 1989 with the publication of A Promise Is A Promise, co-authored with Robert Munsch.

It's an adaptation of traditional Inuit tales about qallupilluit, sea creatures that lurk beneath the sea ice.

Over the course of eight more books, Kusugak has sought to counter the misconceptions about Inuit fostered by works of fiction about the North written, in some cases, by people who have never been here.

"These people make up things about us that are not true," he said.

One of Kusugak's books, The Curse of the Shaman was a pre-contact story about Marble Island.

That island, near Rankin Inlet, is the centre of important Inuit creation stories, as well as the campsite of the doomed expedition of James Knight, whose two ships sank near the island around 1720.

That story is the stuff of Kusugak's next novel, The Mean Knight, though Kusugak will once again be writing from an Inuit perspective. The first draft of that novel is to be completed some time early in the new year.

Like many writers, Kusugak spends a lot of time in isolation, pounding out pages. It can be a lonely craft, he admits, producing books which he sends off to agents to have published and sometimes wondering if anyone reads them.

Then something like winning the Vicky Metcalf award happens to get his attention. Otherwise it's up to his wife Gerry Pflueger, who's also his booking agent, tour manager and "sounding board."

"Every once in a while I have to poke him to get his attention," she said.

When he's not writing, Kusugak spends a lot of time on the road, speaking to school kids in Canada, the United States and Europe.

As his appearance at last year's Alianait! arts festival attests, Kusugak is a master of holding the attention of young audiences with his arsenal of gestures, facial expressions and string games.

That's a product of the early days of his writing career when he'd go into schools with only one book to read to students.

"I could read the book in 15 minutes and had 45 minutes to kill, so I'd talk about Inuit," he said. If he was nervous so were the kids. So he just started telling legends and stories handed down through his family and having a good time.

"It made a world of difference and I've been doing it [that way] ever since."

Conventional wisdom holds that today's kids can't pay attention, so warped are their brains by television and video games. But Kusugak said the opposite is true: they get involved in the stories when he's "painting pictures in their heads."

Last week was a good week for the Kusugak family. Michael's brother Lorne was named a cabinet minister in the Government of Nunavut.

But Michael said he's never been much interested in politics, despite terms on the Kivalliq Inuit Association and hamlet council, though his family has made a name in that field (brother Jose is the former head of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, and is currently president of the KIA).

Michael did work for the federal government and the Government of the Northwest Territories for 15 years "and then I wrote a book."

Suddenly, requests for public appearances started flooding in from all over North America. By 1992, with three books under his belt, Kusugak had to make a decision.

"I decided I'm a writer and I've never looked back."