The Toronto Book Awards were established by City Council in 1974, and have honoured Torontoish books of literary or artistic merit ever since. The Awards Committee, Camilla Holland, Brian Jantzi, Winona McMorrow, Sarah Rotering and Herman Silochan, recently announced this year’s nominations. Your 2007 shortlist is:

Sally Gibson’s Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s (Cormorant)
Geoffrey James’s book of photographs, Toronto (Douglas & McIntyre)
Vincent Lam’s novel, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (Doubleday Canada)
Michael Redhill’s novel, Consolation (Doubleday Canada)
Raymond Souster’s collection of poetry, Uptown Downtown (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box)

Our guess? Michael Redhill takes the prize, but we’re now on our way out the door to find Raymond Souster’s 225 page Uptown Downtown: New Poems of the GTA. The book draws on a selection of his shorter work written between 1998 and 2006, and focuses on Toronto’s evolution over the past seventy years. In 1980, Souster's Hanging In shared the prize with Stephen A. Speisman's The Jews of Toronto: A History to 1937.

The award offers a $15,000 purse: each finalist receives $1,000, and the winning author scores the rest. The winner will be announced at a reception on September 5.