Tanya Talaga and André Alexis are among the authors shortlisted for the 2025 Toronto Book Award.
Established by Toronto City Council in 1974, the Toronto Book Awards honour books that are inspired by the city. This year, the prize amounts were doubled, with the winner receiving $20,000 and the shortlisted writers each winning $2,000.
Talaga is shortlisted for her book, The Knowing, which charts the life of her great-great grandmother Annie and the violence she and her family suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church and Canadian government.
“I had to find out about Annie,” said Talaga on Bookends with Mattea Roach. “I was just enraptured by her. I mean, she’s been a mystery for my entire family for over 80 years.
(HarperCollins)
“Part of the reason why I wrote this book … was to empower other First Nations people to do the same thing, to try and look back. And by looking back in our family trees, we’re going to find those people that are crying out to be found. They need to be recognized and heard.”
The Knowing is also a four-part documentary, which can be streamed on CBC Gem.
Talaga is a journalist, author and filmmaker of Anishinaabe and Polish descent and a member of the Fort William First Nation. Talaga also wrote the nonfiction work Seven Fallen Feathers, which also won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2018, the RBC Taylor Prize and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award.
She gave the CBC Massey Lecture in 2018, titled All Our Relations, where she explored the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples.
(McClelland & Stewart)
Canada Reads-winning author Alexis is shortlisted for his short story collection Other Worlds. Spanning from 19th-century Trinidad and Tobago to a small town in Ontario, from Amherst, Massachusetts to modern-day Toronto, Other Worlds explores characters encountering moments of profound puzzlement in these diverse settings.
Alexis was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and raised in Ottawa. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award (now known as the Amazon First Novel Award) and the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
His other books include Pastoral, Asylum, The Hidden Keys, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa and Days by Moonlight, which won the 2019 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was on the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist.
André Alexis’s novel Fifteen Dogs, championed by Humble The Poet, won Canada Reads 2017 and the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
The 6-book shortlist is rounded out by Roza Nozari, Maddie Helwig, Vinh Nguyen and Chika Stacey Oriuwa.
Nozari is shortlisted for her memoir about embracing her identity as a queer Iranian Canadian woman, All the Parts We Exile. Helwig is recognized for her book, Encampment, which tells of her work to provide shelter for the unhoused. Nguyen’s memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is about his family’s journey from Vietnam to Canada, and Oriuwa writes about her path to becoming a doctor as the only Black student in her medical school class in Unlike The Rest.
Many of the shortlisted books are available in accessible formats on the Centre for Equitable Library Access website.
The winner will be named on October 15 at a ceremony in Toronto.