About Shirley

Shirley de Kock Gueller provides a range of corporate communications, including media relations. Specialist skills and experience include consumer relations, tourism and the wine sectors, property and retail.

She has some 30 years’ public relations and media consulting experience in South Africa.   She was an assistant editor of Reader’s Digest South Africa and press liaison officer with the US Information Service in Johannesburg prior and until 2026 was marketing and communications executive to the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra.  She was on the boards of the Cape Town Concert Series and Richard Wagner Society of South Africa in Cape Town  for many years and was on the board of  The Music Room/Scotia Festival of Music in Halifax where she lived and consulted for several years.

She has written for the South African and Canadian (online) editions of Reader’s Digest, has published dozens of interviews, music and travel articles in magazines and online journals (such as WeekendSpecial.co.za under the pseudonym Peta Stewart) and newspapers and wrote the text for An Illustrated Advertising History of South Africa. With Louis Heyneman, she was compiler and editor of A Century of Symphony: The story of Cape Town’s orchestra, published by Jonathan Ball in 2014. She is a regular contributor to Fine Music Radio’s Book Choice review programme, and has written book reviews for Vivian Horler’s The Book Page, Cape Times and Cape Argus in Cape Town and tutored for Smarthinking Inc through Language on Line.  She holds a BA Hons in History and an international comprehensive TESOL certificate for teaching English. She also produced Donizetti’s Viva la Mamma opera for the Richard Wagner Society.