Author Susan Juby is one of five writers nominated for the 2012 Stephen Leacock Medal for humour.
Multiple book prize winner Patrick deWitt is now up for this year's Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour against a crop of female writers.
The organizers of the humour award, which has been handed out since 1947, note that this year's race is somewhat unusual given there are so many women in the running for the $15,000 prize.
The Sisters Brothers by deWitt, which previously won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, is up against Susan Juby's The Woefield Poultry Collective, Rupinder Gill's On the Outside Looking Indian, Shari Lapena's Happiness Economics and Robyn Michele Levy's Most of Me.
A panel of anonymous judges and a group of readers in Orillia, Ont. – where Leacock had a summer home – drew up the short list from 64 contenders.
The winner will be announced on April 26 in Orillia, with an award dinner to follow on June 9.