Thomas King Wins Leacock Medal!

Press Release

The board of Stephen Leacock Associates is pleased to announce that Thomas King is the winner of the 2020 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for his autobiographical novel Indians on Vacation, published by HarperCollins Publishers.  The award of the medal is accompanied by a prize of $15,000.

Thomas King is an award winning novelist, short story writer, scriptwriter and photographer. His critically acclaimed, bestselling books include Medicine River; Green Grass, Running Water; One Good Story, That One; Truth and Bright Water; A Short History of Indians in Canada; The Back of the Turtle (winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction); Sufferance; The Inconvenient Indian (winner of the RBC Taylor Prize); the DreadfulWater mystery series, including most recently Obsidian; and the poetry collection 77 Fragments of a Familiar Ruin (shortlisted for the Nelson Ball Prize)

The two runners-up, Joseph Kertes (for his novel Last Impressions, published by Penguin Random House) and Murray Morgan (for his novel Dirty Birds, published by Breakwater Books) will each receive a prize of $3,000.

The board congratulates all the winners for their splendid efforts.  It also acknowledges and appreciates the efforts of all the authors of the books submitted for this year’s medal.

A Canada-wide panel of judges had narrowed 77 initial submissions to form a longlist of 10 highly recommended works, with only three books eventually being selected for the shortlist.

Once again, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the medal and cash prizes will not be awarded at the usual Gala Dinner but will be mailed to the winners.  The authors’ achievements will be celebrated instead at next year’s Gala Dinner, in 2022, together with the winners of the 2020 and 2022 medals.

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