Catherine Hernandez (Zahra Siddiqui)

The finalists for this year’s Toronto Book Awards, recognizing one title that best reflects the city’s residents and culture, have been announced. Among this year’s shortlisters are restaurateur Jen Agg, for her memoir about thriving as a woman in the male-dominated Toronto restaurant scene, and Catherine Hernandez’s novel about the city’s east end, Scarborough (the only work of fiction to appear on the 2017 list).

The shortlist is as follows:

• Jen Agg, I Hear She’s A Real Bitch (Doubleday Canada)
• Jane Farrow and John Lorinc, eds., Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer (Coach House Books)
• Catherine Hernandez, Scarborough (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• B. Denham Jolly, In the Black: My Life (ECW Press)
• James Maskalyk, Life on the Ground Floor (Doubleday Canada)

The finalists will perform a public reading at the Toronto Public Library’s S. Walter Stewart branch on Oct. 3, and will each receive a $1,000 prize. The winner of the $10,000 award will be announced on Oct. 12 at the Toronto Reference Library’s Bram and Bluma Appel Salon.