Richard Wagamese
Photo courtesy of The Martlet, Canadian University PressRichard Wagamese was born in Northern Ontario to the Ojibway Wabasseemoong First Nation. He has been a journalist, novelist, reviewer, columnist and broadcaster.
Fortunately for British Columbians who want to hear some of this spellbinding oral stories, he now lives near Kamloops.
Wagamese is a wonderful storyteller who plays this game. Of the audience he asks for five words and a sentence. Then he closes his eyes, and a minute or two later, opens them to tell story that incorporates all the words and ends with the sentence. At CanWrite! 2010 in Victoria, I was privileged to witness this creative feat.
The novels written by Wagamese are Keeper'n Me, A Quality of Light, Ragged Company, and Dream Wheels, winner of the 2007 CAA Award. For Joshua: an Ojibway Father Teaches his Son (2003), as its title reveals, is a book of another sort.
Wagamese has lectured in Creative Writing for the University of Saskatchewan's Indian Federated College, served as a faculty advisor in Journalism at Grant MacEwan College and SAIT, and won many Journalism awards. He has also written for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and done scriptwriting for North of Sixty and extensive work in radio and TV documentary.
His fine collection of essays, One Native Life, appeared in 2008 (Douglas & McIntyre) and was selected by the Globe and Mail as one of its Top 100 Books of the Year. In 2011, Richard Wagamese won the George Ryga Award, an honour reserved for writers who have achieved an outstanding degree of social awareness.