Month: July 2023

Hugh Brewster

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This week we welcome Hugh Brewster to the programme. Being able to create books about history is a dream job for Hugh, since he’s always been enthralled by history. As an editor for Scholastic from 1972 to 1984 in both Toronto and New York, he was involved in the creation of Scholastic’s Canadian children’s publishing program. Between 1984 and 2004 he was the publisher of Madison Press Books in Toronto where he helped to create a number of successful books for both adults and young readers, including Exploring the Titanic, which has sold over one million copies and Titanic: An Illustrated History, which provided inspiration for James Cameron’s epic movie.

As an author, he has written fifteen books including Anastasia’s Album (1996) which won both the Silver Birch and Red Cedar Awards.  And he has won multiple awards for many of his other books including Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, a Governor General’s Award nominee in 2007, and From Vimy to Victory which was a Finalist for the T-D Canadian Children’s Literature Award and the Norma Fleck Award in 2015. An adult book RMS TITANIC: Gilded Lives on a Fatal Voyage was a national bestseller and published in six countries in 2012. He has written several plays and LAST DAY, LAST HOUR: Canada’s Great War On Trial was presented in the fall of 2018 as the centerpiece of Cobourg’s Armistice 18 commemoration which he helped organize. His latest book, published in Fall ’22, is UNSINKABLE LUCILE: How A Farm Girl Became the Queen of Fashion and Survived the Titanic. 

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Jay Dart

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This week we welcome Jay Dart. Jay is a Canadian drawist, author and designer whose practice includes bookworks, animated videos and mixed media installations. Dart’s work has been shown in galleries and art fairs including exhibitions in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Regina and recently at the Art Gallery of Northumberland; as well as internationally in Paris, New York, and Amsterdam. He is the recipient of multiple grants and honors including from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and a National Magazine Award for editorial illustration. His work has been featured on CBC Radio and TV including a profile on The Exhibitionists. He is a graduate of the University of Guelph’s Fine Art programme. Currently, he lives and draws with his family in a small hamlet outside the sprawl of Toronto, and he teaches Drawing and Design at Durham College and Sheridan College.

J D Carpenter

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 This week we welcome back J.D. Carpenter to Word on the Hills. David was born in Toronto in 1948. Some years later, he graduated from York University with a B.A.Hons. and then from Queen’s with a B.Ed. He worked as a journalist for Daily Racing Form in Montreal, Windsor, Fort Erie and Toronto before becoming a teacher. After four years of teaching elementary school, he began 25 years of teaching English and then became Head of Department for Special Education at Leaside High School in Toronto He is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent, A Road through the Corn: Prince Edward County Poems, 1982-2022 was published by Cressy Lakeside Press in 2022. He is also the author of six novels, including a series featuring sleuth Campbell Young and his friends set in the racing world so familiar to this writer. He is at present working on the final draft of Black Tupelo, the concluding volume in this series. The County Murders (Cressy Lakeside, 2016) has a new protagonist, a journalist based in a small town in Prince Edward County.

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Shelagh Mathers (S M Hurley)

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Author Shelagh Mathers retired from her law practice in 2020, just as the pandemic moved into full gear. Though she misses the people she worked with she doesn’t miss the practice. And she quickly settled into retirement and did a fun turn as a co-host of a local radio show, The County, Naturally. Recently however she stepped back from that to focus full time on Book # 3 in her series about Augie De Graaf, Prince Edward County Crown Prosecutor, which is now proceeding apace. Her second book in this series is called The Sevens and was published in 2020. She now spends a lot of time at the cottage with family, including a new granddaughter, who, like all grandchildren, is the most wonderful thing in the world!

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