Tanya Talaga and André Alexis are among the longlisted authors 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 longlisted 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.
“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.Â
Seven Fallen Feathers also received the RBC Taylor Prize and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award.
In her 2018 CBC Massey Lectures series, titled All Our Relations, Talaga explored the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples.Â
Canada Reads-winning author Alexis is longlisted 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.Â
André Alexis tries to answer a question we’ve all wondered: what if dogs had human consciousness?
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.Â
André Alexis’s novel Fifteen Dogs, championed by Humble The Poet, won Canada Reads 2017 and the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Many of the shortlisted books are available in accessible formats on the Centre for Equitable Library Access website.Â
The complete longlist is below.
The jury is comprised of Sam Hiyate, Sophie Jai, Wanda Nanibush, Don Oravec and David Silverberg.
The shortlist will be announced later this summer. The winner will be named on October 15 at a ceremony in Toronto.
