2025 Toronto Book Awards

All the Parts We Exile is Roza Nozari’s warm, moving, and poignant coming of age story. The author presents Toronto as a unique and diasporic anchor from which she comes to grips with her family’s trauma and her own, while finding her place in the world as a queer Muslim woman. Reza’s voice is both raw and tender, compelling and confessional—you can’t help but love her, and cheer her on to overcome and reconcile her challenges and obstacles, to ultimately find herself, her art and her place in the world.

Encampment is the book for anyone who has ever looked at an unhoused settlement and wondered—how does this happen in a country as wealthy as Canada, in a city as vibrant and seemingly compassionate as Toronto? Encampment is the chronicle of an unhoused community on the doorstep of St. Stephen’s in the Field Anglican Church in Kensington Market. Maggie Helwig, the church pastor, becomes a champion of the encampment in her midst and details in exquisite prose the plight of the individuals who make up this unhoused community. It’s a difficult book to put down once you start reading and impossible to forget once you finish. Helwig’s exceptional storytelling compels us to care. You will never look at an unhoused community the same way again.

Andre Alexis’s speculative fiction Other Worlds is a feat of imagination and connection across time and place. Alexis travels the tributaries that connect Toronto to the Caribbean and Southern Ontario while collapsing the past and future into a present imbued with the wisdom of loss, love and the earth. Even though a horse speaks and a medicine man is reincarnated, the “otherworldly” in his stories feels ordinary and thus revelatory.  A balm for a grieving and seeking soul, Alexis’s latest collection of short stories is by turns philosophical and emotional with the grace of humour about the human condition.

The Knowing is Tanya Talaga’s deeply moving, well structured tale of a compelling personal history and a ‘national crime’. Talaga weaves the history of residential schools, Toronto psychiatry during the depression with her search to name, locate and honour her ancestors. With her, we embark on the path from unmarked graves to healing the circle of community as we are led through the thickets of colonialism made visible in Talaga’s kitchen table-style narration. Tears will be shed but ultimately it is the power of the ancestors that forms the heart of this important book.

Decades after fleeing to Toronto from postwar Vietnam with his family, Vinh Nguyen blurts out, “I want to go back.” So begins Nguyen’s recollection of his past: his childhood house in Vietnam, the many refugee camps in Thailand, and his father, who would never make it to Canada to join the family. Nguyen’s profound meditations on home and displacement depict a poetic, heart-gripping account of living with uncertainty, rewriting the past to come to terms with the present, and existing between belonging and non-belonging. Nguyen’s memoir offers a bare-souled window into the lives we as Torontonians pass on our way to work, sit next to on the train, or bump into in an elevator—a portrait of a life that shows us how many definitions being ‘Canadian’ can truly hold.

With a poetic flair and stories that will make you laugh and cry, Dr. Chika Stacy Oriuwa has written a powerful and compelling book with Unlike the Rest: A Doctor’s Story. Sharing her arduous journey to hurdle systemic racial barriers at medical school, while also infusing her story with poignant musings on motherhood, friendships and spoken word poetry, she reveals nuances of health care and the education system that many of us don’t see.