A tour de force of inventive wit Shakespeare's Dog is the eccentric and high-spirited story of William Shakespeare and how he came to bed and wed Anne Hathaway.

Told from the point of view of the Bard's dog, this astonishing novel of comic bliss, hailed as a triumph of language and an amusing delight.

An energetic and prolific storyteller, Leon Rooke's writing is characterized by inventive language, experimental form and an extreme range of characters with distinctive voices. He has written a number of plays for radio and stage and produced numerous collections of short stories. It is his novels, however, that have received the most critical acclaim. Fat Woman (1980) was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and won the Paperback Novel of the Year Award. Shakespeare's Dog won the Governor General's Award in 1983. As a play, Shakespeare's Dog has toured as far afield as Barcelona and Edinburgh. A Good Baby was made into a feature film. Rooke founded the Eden Mills Writers' Festival in 1989. In 2007, Rooke was made a member of the Order of Canada. Other awards include the Canada/Australia prize, the W O Mitchell Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature and two ReLits (for short fiction and poetry). In 2012, he was the winner of the Gloria Vanderbilt Carter V Cooper Fiction Award. Recently, Rooke's works The Fall of Gravity and Shakespeare's Dog were produced in new editions for France and Italy, two countries where his work has been greatly admired.

Leon Rooke's profile page

Shelagh Rogers began her career at CKWS Radio and Television in Kingston, Ontario in country music, news and TV weather.

In the early 1980’s, she joined CBC Radio in Ottawa. She moved to Toronto in 1984. In 1986, she interviewed Peter Gzowski about his plans to raise money for literacy. Peter then invited her to read the listener mail on his program Morningside. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

For ten years, she was host of The Arts Tonight, part of the wildly popular Humline Trio on Basic Black and sidekick to the inimitable Max Ferguson. In 1995, Peter Gzowski created a new role for Shelagh: Deputy Host of Morningside. In September of 2000, Rogers began two years as host of CBC Radio's flagship current affairs program This Morning. Her morning time slot morphed into Sounds Like Canada, which is now based out of Vancouver.
Shelagh adds her voice to a number of causes including mental illness awareness, homelessness, homeless youth training. She has been a literacy volunteer for more than two decades, continuing to make real Peter’s dream of ensuring everyone in this richly blessed country has the right to literacy. In her spare time, being gifted with surplus adipose tissue, she is a passionate ocean swimmer and doesn’t feel the cold at all.

Shelagh is the author of Canada, a book of photographs by the great Winnipeg photographer Mike Grandmaison. It’s published by Key Porter. She also contributed to Nobody’s Mother, a collection of essays by and about women who haven’t had children.

Three recent honours mean a lot to Shelagh: the John Drainie Award for Significant Contribution to Canadian Broadcasting, an Honourary Doctorate from the University of Western Ontario and a Certificate for best spring-roll maker and egg cracker from Mitzi’s Sister Restaurant in Toronto. 

Shelagh Rogers' profile page

• Winner, Governor General's Award for Fiction

The most idiosyncratic and diverting of biographies of a man whose life stays shrouded in a lost quotidian...Leon Rooke's capacity for unusual kinds of empathy was already amply demonstrated in his last novel, Fat Woman. In Shakespeare's Dog he's put his talent to the test and passed triumphantly...a robust delight.

Harper's

A veritable find, a novel to thoroughly delight and amuse the most jaded of readers...it is lickerish, witty and full of panache.

Publishers Weekly

Shakespeare's Dog is a breakthrough book. It's marvellously inventive, full of juicy delights.

Globe and Mail

Exuberant...a triumph.

Maclean's

A rollicking comic novel...a triumph of characterization and language.

Toronto Star