Stephen P. H. Butler Leacock was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humourist. Between the years 1915 and 1925, he was the best-known English-speaking humourist in the world. He is known for his light humour along with criticisms of people's follies.
Orillia is a city in Ontario, Canada, about 30 km north-east of Barrie in Simcoe County. It is located at the confluence of Lake Couchiching and Lake Simcoe. Although it is geographically located within Simcoe County, the city is a single-tier municipality. It is part of the Huronia region of Central Ontario. The population in 2021 was 33,411.
The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, also known as the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour or just the Leacock Medal, is an annual Canadian literary award presented for the best book of humour written in English by a Canadian writer, published or self-published in the previous year. The silver medal, designed by sculptor Emanuel Hahn, is a tribute to well-known Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) and is accompanied by a cash prize of $25,000 (CAD). It is presented in the late spring or early summer each year, during a banquet ceremony in or near Leacock’s hometown of Orillia, Ontario.
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is a sequence of stories by Stephen Leacock, first published in 1912. It is generally considered to be one of the most enduring classics of Canadian humorous literature. The fictional setting for these stories is Mariposa, a small town on the shore of Lake Wissanotti. Although drawn from his experiences in Orillia, Ontario, Leacock notes: "Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is about seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees and the same churches and hotels."
Wayne Johnston is a Canadian novelist. His fiction deals primarily with the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, often in a historical setting. In 2011 Johnston was awarded the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award in recognition of his overall contribution to Canadian Literature.
Mariposa Folk Festival is a Canadian music festival founded in 1961 in Orillia, Ontario. It was held in Orillia for three years before being banned because of disturbances by festival-goers. After being held in various places in Ontario for a few decades, it returned to Orillia in 2000. Ruth Jones, her husband Dr. Frederick Crawford Jones, brother David Major and Pete McGarvey organized the first Mariposa Folk Festival in August 1961. The inaugural event, covered by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, featured all Canadian performers. The festival grew in popularity, size and rowdiness until the popularity of the 1963 festival, and the lack of sufficient security, led to a backlash from town locals. The city of Orillia secured a court injunction to prevent the festival from continuing in the town limits. The first festival held in the Toronto area, in 1964, was at Maple Leaf Stadium. The subsequent three festivals were held at Innis Lake in Caledon, northwest of the city. In the 1970s it was held on the Toronto Islands before shifting to Harbourfront (Toronto) and Bathurst Street and later Molson Park in Barrie. In 2000, the Mariposa Folk Festival was invited back to Orillia by city councilors Tim Lauer and Don Evans. The festival continues to be held in Orillia. As well as folk music, the festival highlights other aspects of folk culture including dance, crafts, storytelling.
Mariposa is a fictional Canadian town created by Stephen Leacock as the setting for a series of short stories. Commissioned by The Montreal Star newspaper, they were later collected and published in one volume as Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Since then, many attempts have been made to expand the canon, present it in a different form or make reference to it.
Lawrence Martin is a Canadian journalist and the author of ten books on politics and sport. Raised in Hamilton, Ontario, he received a Bachelor of Arts in political science McMaster University in 1969 and a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University in 1982.
Gary Lautens was a Canadian humorist and newspaper columnist. He wrote for the Toronto Star from 1962 until his death in 1992.
Trevor Cole is a Canadian novelist and journalist. He has published five novels; the first two, Norman Bray in the Performance of his Life (2004) and The Fearsome Particles (2006), were nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.
Morley Torgov is a Canadian novelist, humorist and lawyer. He was a partner in the Toronto-based legal firm Olch, Torgov, Cohen LLP.
The Township of Mariposa was a municipality located in the southwest corner of the former Victoria County, now the city of Kawartha Lakes, in the Canadian province of Ontario. The other municipal neighbours of Mariposa are Ops and Fenelon on the east, Eldon on the north, Brock on the west, and Scugog on the south, with the latter two located in the Durham Regional Municipality. The former township includes the communities of Little Britain, Manilla, Mariposa, Valentia, and Oakwood. Today, most of the former township is represented in the City of Kawartha Lakes by the Ward 8 Councillor, John Pollard, and Ward 4 Councillor Andrew Veale.
Joey Slinger is a Canadian journalist and author, particularly known as a long-standing humour columnist for the Toronto Star.
Robert Wringham is a British writer, best known for his humor writing and as the editor of New Escapologist magazine. His first collection, A Loose Egg, was shortlisted for the 2015 Leacock Medal. He has also written two histories of alternative comedy and a comic novel.
Joan Walker, née Suter, was a Canadian writer. She won two noted Canadian literary awards in the 1950s, the Stephen Leacock Award in 1954 for Pardon My Parka and the Ryerson Fiction Award in 1957 for Repent at Leisure. Pardon My Parka was a humorous memoir of her own experiences adapting to Canadian culture after moving to Canada as a war bride, while Repent at Leisure was a novel about a woman trapped in a troubled marriage.
Charles William Gordon is a Canadian writer and retired journalist, best known as a longtime columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.
Jane Christmas is a Canadian writer from Hamilton, currently based in the UK, who was twice a nominee for the Stephen Leacock Award.
Scaachi Koul is a former Canadian culture writer at BuzzFeed Canada. She is the author of the book of essays One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter and was one of the reporters in BuzzFeed's Netflix documentary series Follow This. Before BuzzFeed, Koul worked at Penguin Random House Canada, the acquiring publisher of her book. Her journalism has appeared in Flare, HuffPost Canada, The Thought Catalog, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and other publications.
Ali Bryan is a Canadian novelist, and personal trainer. Her second novel, The Figgs, was shortlisted for the 2019 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
Randal Graham is a Canadian law professor, novelist, and the Goodmans LLP Faculty Fellow in legal ethics at the University of Western Ontario Faculty of Law.
