Kate Cayley is the winner of the 2026 Toronto Book Award for her novel, Property (Coach House Books).
The jury describes Property as “a novel of dazzling interiority” that skillfully explores the anxieties, desires and obsessions of four families living on a single Toronto street. 
Kate Cayley is a fiction writer, poet and playwright. Previously, she published two short story collections and three collections of poetry. She won the Trillium Book Award, the Mitchell Prize for Poetry and an O. Henry Prize, and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, among other awards.
Established by Toronto City Council in 1974, the Toronto Book Awards celebrate authors whose works capture the spirit, history, people and places of Toronto. Cayley receives a $20,000 prize, while the remaining shortlisted authors each receive $2,000.
If Virginia Woolf had lived in present-day Toronto, she might write something like Kate Cayley’s Property. A novel of dazzling interiority, Cayley skillfully juggles the anxieties, desires, and obsessions of four families living on one unnamed West End street over the course of a single fateful day. While homes are demolished and rebuilt over buried creeks and capital courses like a riverway from one neighbourhood of the city to another, Property swims through the private psychodramas of its characters, all of whom seem fully realized as they flow towards a dinner party that will change their lives forever. Addressing contemporary concerns without feeling laden by them and evoking the feeling of living in Toronto without naming a single geographical feature, this very human story demonstrates its ambitions while bookending a singular truth: that no matter what occurs in the legacies we hand to our children, the true inheritors of this city are the rats that burrow underneath it.
This year’s jury brings together an accomplished group of award-winning writers, publishing professionals, educators and literary advocates from across Toronto’s literary community, including author and poet Jake Byrne, novelist and non-fiction writer Kristen den Hartog, literary agent Julia Kim, educator, anti-racism advocate and writer Matthew R. Morris and poet, translator and curator Bänoo Zan.
Toronto Public Library has created a reading list of the 2026 shortlist titles.
