Andrew J. Borkowski has received the 2012 Toronto Book Award for Copernicus Avenue (Cormorant Books), a collection of linked short stories set in the city’s west-end Polish neighbourhood after the Second World War. The award was presented at a ceremony Thursday night at the Toronto Reference Library’s Bram & Bluma Appel Salon.

The other finalists were: Dave Bidini‘s Writing Gordon Lightfoot: The Man, the Music, and the World in 1972 (McClelland & Stewart); Farzana Doctor’s Six Metres of Pavement (Dundurn Press); Michele Landsberg’s Writing the Revolution (Second Story Press); and Suzanne Robertson’s Paramita, Little Black (Guernica Editions).

Borkowski, who was also nominated for the 2012 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, received $10,000, and the other nominees were awarded $1,000 each.