Canada's largest literary festival, running since 1974
Toronto's Literary Scene
Home to Margaret Atwood and Canada's largest, longest-running literary festival — plus, for decades, a store that genuinely called itself the World's Biggest Bookstore and largely meant it.
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Toronto's literary reputation runs deeper than Margaret Atwood alone — the city hosts Canada's largest literary festival and a genuinely dense independent bookstore scene.
The Toronto International Festival of Authors (since 1974)
Founded in 1974, the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA, formerly IFOA) is Canada's largest and longest-running literary festival, drawing leading authors from around the world for more than 100 readings, talks and events each year. It called Harbourfront Centre home for 50 years before more recently partnering with Victoria College at the University of Toronto.
The World's Biggest Bookstore
From 1980 to 2014, Toronto was home to a store that put its ambition right in the name: the World's Biggest Bookstore, on Edward Street near Yonge and Dundas. At its peak it stocked roughly a million books across close to two football fields of retail space — a genuine city landmark for over three decades before closing in 2014 as book retail shifted decisively online.
An independent bookstore scene that outlasted it
Despite losing its single biggest name, Toronto's independent bookstore scene has stayed genuinely strong — shops like Type Books and Flying Books cover everything from literary fiction to small-press poetry, part of a broader culture of storytelling and independent publishing that keeps Toronto's literary identity intact even without one giant flagship store to point to.
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Sources
- Wikipedia — Toronto International Festival of Authors
- Destination Toronto — Literary Toronto: A Book Lovers' Guide