An awarding journalist and author joins the lineup of Daily News columnists starting Tuesday.
Richard Wagamese will write every other Tuesday, alternating with Daniela Ginta.
Wagamese has worked as a professional writer since 1979. He's been a newspaper columnist and reporter, radio and television broadcaster and producer, documentary producer and the author of 11 novels.
The 57-year-old Ojibway from the Wabaseemoong First Nation in northwestern Ontario became the first native Canadian to win a National Newspaper Award for Column Writing in 1991.
He won the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature for his 2011 memoir One Story, One Song, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction for his third novel Dream Wheels, in 2007, and the Alberta Writers Guild Best Novel Award for his debut novel, Keeper'n Me, in 1994.
Wagamese is the 2012 recipient of the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for Media & Communications. He has twice won the Native American Press Association Award and the National Aboriginal Communications Society Award for his newspaper columns. Currently, his series One Native Life runs as a radio commentary and newspaper column in both Canada and the U.S. and was a weekly television commentary on CFJC-TV in Kamloops from 2007 to 2010.
Wagamese received an honorary doctorate from Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops in 2010 and was the 2011 Harvey Stevenson Southam guest lecturer in writing at the University of Victoria.
He lives near Paul Lake with his wife Debra Powell.
