This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Toronto Book Awards. Special programming is in the works to mark this milestone year. Submissions for the 2024 prizes close on April 30. This year’s jury features former Toronto Book Awards finalists and winners.
Desmond Cole is a journalist, activist and author based in Toronto. His work focuses on struggles against state violence, particularly local policing. Desmond was a columnist at the Toronto Star from late 2015 to early 2017, where he wrote about politics, class, policing and anti-Black racism. He has produced works for live news radio, podcasts, magazines, newspapers and a documentary film. Desmond’s 2020 best-selling book, The Skin We’re In, A Year of Black Resistance and Power, received national acclaim and won the 2020 Toronto Book Award.
Anthony De Sa grew up in Toronto’s Portuguese community. His first book, Barnacle Love, a collection of linked short stories, was a finalist for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2009 Toronto Book Award, and was the winner of Portugal’s Premios Talento for Literature. His second book, the national bestseller, Kicking the Sky, was a finalist for the 2014 Toronto Book Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award and Libris Award. Anthony’s third book, Children of the Moon, received critical acclaim. Anthony enjoys good coffee when working on his current novel, All the Good Sinners. The author lives in Toronto with his wife and three sons.
Jane Farrow is a writer, former CBC broadcaster and advocate for livable cities. Her books include the bestselling Wanted Words 1 & 2 and, as co-editor, Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer (Toronto Book Award finalist in 2017) and two editions of The Canadian Book of Lists. Jane worked as a CBC Radio One producer (This Morning, Sunday Edition) and hosted And Sometimes Y and Workology. Jane has helped people tell the stories of their neighbourhoods as the first director of Jane’s Walk, a global movement of free, citizen-led walking tours celebrating the ideas of urbanist Jane Jacobs, a champion for livable, walkable cities.
Rabindranath Maharaj is the author of six novels and three short story collections. His novel, The Amazing Absorbing Boy, won the Toronto Book Award and the Trillium Fiction Prize in 2011. The following year, Maharaj received a Lifetime Literary Award as part of the commemoration of Trinidad’s 50th independence anniversary, and in 2013 he was awarded Canada’s Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. His books have been published in Canada, the US, the UK, the Netherlands and Turkey. He is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Tessa McWatt, of Luminous Ink: An Anthology of Canadian Writing (2018).
Kerri Sakamoto is an award-winning author whose books have been translated into numerous languages and published internationally. Accolades include an international Commonwealth Writers Prize, two Canada-Japan Literary Awards, and the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award. Kerri’s latest novel, Floating City, was a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards in 2018.
