Burgess longlisted for the Leacock
May 05th, 2025
BC-based humour writer, Steve Burgess’s Reservations: The Pleasures and Perils of Travel (D&M $26.95) has been longlisted for the 2025 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour
Celebrating 78 years since its inception, the award recognizes excellence in Canadian literary humour. Past winners have included Terry Fallis, Will Ferguson, W.O. Mitchell, Stuart McLean and Mordecai Richler.
The three finalists for the award will be named on Tuesday, May 20, 2025, with the medal winner being announced on Saturday, June 21, 2025, at the Leacock Medal Award Gala Dinner in Orillia, Ontario.
As Reservations notes, travel was once a marker of sophistication. Now the tourist is just as likely to be viewed as one locust in an annihilating swarm. Tourists face tough questions: When does economic opportunity become exploitation? How do we justify the use of climate-changing jet fuel? And can we be sure our tourist dollars aren’t propping up corrupt and brutal regimes?
Now, as the world returns to travel, Steve Burgess asks: Is satisfying our own wanderlust worth the trouble it causes everyone else? Or is the tourist guilty of the charges—from voyeurism to desecration—levelled against them by everyone from environmentalists to exhausted locals and superior-feeling fellow tourists who have traded in the tour bus for “authentic experiences?”
In this comedic interrogation of our right to roam, Burgess looks into the traveller’s soul, sharing the stories of some of his most personally significant travels, from Rome to Tana Toraja, and looking to studies and experts around the world for insight into why we travel and how we could do it better. And throughout, he tells the story of a month in Japan—his first trip outside North America—and the whirlwind cross-cultural romance that brought him there and took him on a journey around the country in search of wonder and maybe even love.
“Steve’s sly humour made Reservations so much fun to read, but it’s his candour about what leaves many of us conflicted about travel that has stayed with me—from the environmental impact of tourism to selfie culture,” says Ian Hanomansing, co-host of CBC’s The National. “A reminder of why and how we should travel, his gentle message to those obsessively checking off bucket lists is ‘Serendipity is the bucket with a hole in it.’ More than anything, this is a man who loves seeing the world, and it was a joy seeing it with him.”
Andrew Coyne, a columnist for The Globe and Mail says of Burgess’s book: “A defense of tourism, in spite of it all, from a passionate but conflicted traveler. Steve Burgess mixes brooding insights with biting humour—Paul Theroux meets David Sedaris—as he roams the world in search of adventure, meaning and love. A sparkling, provocative inquiry into the soul of the self-loathing tourist.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Burgess is a writer and broadcaster whose honours include two Canadian National Magazine awards. Burgess is a contributing editor of The Tyee and an award-winning documentary director. He is the author of Who Killed Mom? (Greystone, 2011) and his stories have been featured in publications including Reader’s Digest, Maclean’s and The Globe and Mail. He lives in Vancouver.
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