NEWS RELEASE
STEPHEN LEACOCK MEMORIAL MEDAL FOR HUMOUR
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The president and board of directors of Stephen Leacock Associates are pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2023 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.
In the running for the medal and $25,000 prize are, in alphabetical order by author surname:
• Wayne Johnston, Jennie's Boy (Alfred A. Knopf Canada)
• Susan Juby, Mindful of Murder (HarperCollins Publishers)
• Zarqa Nawaz, Jameela Green Ruins Everything (Simon and Schuster Canada)
“The three finalists for the Leacock Medal of Humour in 2023 meet our judging criteria perfectly,” said Michael Hill, the president of the Stephen Leacock Associates. "The books must be humorous, well-written and show a great degree of style and depth. Our national panel of independent judges has selected the three top humorous books from the past year from 71 entries."
The winner will be announced on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, at the Leacock Medal Gala Dinner where all three finalists will be celebrated, and a number of former winners will be in attendance. The M.C. for this event will be Morgan Murray (finalist in 2020) and Trevor Cole (winner in 2011) will entertain everyone as the fictional Mayor of Mariposa.
Tickets for this memorable event and for the Meet the Authors and Student Showcase event the previous evening (with two-time Medal winner Terry Fallis as M.C.) are available for purchase online.
The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour awards are generously sponsored by the Dunkley Charitable Foundation.
For more information about Stephen Leacock Associates, please visit the website.
Wayne Johnston was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. Widely acclaimed for his magical weaving of fact and fiction, his masterful plotting, and his gift for both description and character, his #1 nationally bestselling novels include The Divine Ryans, A World Elsewhere, The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.
His first book, The Story of Bobby O’Malley, published when he was just 26 years old, won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Baltimore’s Mansion, a memoir about his father and grandfather, won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for literary nonfiction. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, published in 1998, was nominated for 16 national and international awards including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was a Canada Reads finalist defended by Justin Trudeau.
Susan Juby was raised in Smithers, B.C. and has lived in Toronto, Vancouver, and Nanaimo. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Getting the Girl, Another Kind of Cowboy and The Woefield Poultry Collective, as well as the bestselling Alice series (Alice, I Think; Miss Smithers; and Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last).
Her first book, Alice, I Think, was adapted into a TV series on CTV. Rolling Stone called it one of the top 40 young adult novels. Her memoir about her struggles with teenaged addiction, Nice Recovery, was a Globe and Mail best book of the year. Her most recent book for adults, Republic of Dirt, won the Leacock Medal for Humour. The Fashion Committee was a Horn Book Best Book of the Year and The Truth Commission was named a best book of the year by Barnes and Noble, the Globe and Mail, and Kirkus, and it was the winner of the Sheila A. Egoff Award for Children’s Literature and the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award.
After dropping out of fashion college and getting a BA from the University of British Columbia, Susan went to work in the book industry and obtained a master’s degree in publishing. She currently lives on Vancouver Island, where she teaches creative writing at Vancouver Island University.
Zarqa Nawaz is a Canadian film and television producer, public speaker, journalist, and former broadcaster. She is the author of the memoir Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, which was shortlisted for the Leacock Medal for Humour, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and two Saskatchewan Book Awards. She also created the hit CBC comedy series Little Mosque on the Prairie, the world’s first sitcom about a Muslim community living in the West, and is the creator and star of the forthcoming series Zarqa. Zarqa lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, with her loving but long-suffering family.
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