Launch of Starlight at the University of Victoria, Dec. She has also won the Margaret Trudeau award for mental health advocacy and is an activist for ending adult literacy. Recently, Rogers had the honour of co-hosting a special radio broadcast of the 2018 Scotiabank Giller prize gala event with CBC’s Jael Richardson.īesides being a champion of Canadian books, Rogers has won many awards including the Transforming Lives Award in 2008. “It was part of an initiative to hire more women in the industry,” says Rogers. Rogers began her career for the CBC radio in 1980 when she was twenty-four. “Authors are very grateful for what she does for them,” says Juby. Susan Juby, Creative Writing and Journalism professor at Vancouver Island University (VIU) and author of the popular YA novel Alice I Think, was interviewed by Rogers when her first book got published. “I wasn’t promoting the book per se, but it may have happened along the way,” says Rogers. Rogers was originally asked by his publisher to celebrate Wagamese’s life and legacy and to pay tribute to his last novel to several literary events. When Rogers first interviewed Wagamese, she mispronounced his name, she rhymed Wagamese with wheezy something she calls the “Italian treatment.” That’s when they first became friends. “I’ve known Richard since 1994 and we were close friends,” she says. Rogers received the manuscript for Starlight in 2014 but did not read it until after his death in 2017. Richard Wagamese died in March 2017, aged 61, before finishing his last novel, Starlight (Penguin Random House, 2019, reviewed here by Eldon Yellowhorn - ed). On December 4, 2018, she hosted the tribute to Richard Wagamese’s final book at UVic’s First Peoples’ House. Rogers is currently the chancellor of the University of Victoria (UVic), a role that has her presenting many events on and around campus since 2015. “We were the number two show on CBC when Rick Mercer was on the air,” she says with her familiar voice that is smooth like polished stone. Rogers produces and hosts the long-running CBC radio show The Next Chapter, where she has had the good fortune to discuss books with a vast array of Canadian authors. We talk for almost an hour over cooling coffee, “Oh, I’m used to cold coffee,” Rogers jokes.

Rogers wears the iconic pointy blue glasses that make her look like a pleasant librarian instead of one of Canada’s best-known radio broadcasters. Shelagh Rogers walks in with an air of authority and greets everyone warmly as she stands in line at the local coffee shop on Gabriola Island.

INTERVIEW: Shelagh Rogers by Starlight: CBC’s Host of The Next Chapter Shines a Light on Indigenous Authors

Starlight by richard wagamese review