Lawrence Hill The Book of Negroes

Lawrence Hill is the son of American immigrants — a black father and a white mother — who came to Canada the day after they married in 1953 in Washington, D.C. On his father's side, Hill's grandfather and great grandfather were university-educated, ordained ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His mother came from a Republican family in Oak Park, Illinois, graduated from Oberlin College and went on to become a civil rights activist in D.C. The story of how they met, married, left the United States and raised a family in Toronto is described in Hill's bestselling memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (HarperCollins Canada, 2001). Growing up in the predominantly white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario in the sixties, Hill was greatly influenced by his parents' work in the human rights movement. Much of Hill's writing touches on issues of identity and belonging.

Lawrence Hill's third novel was published as The Book of Negroes in Canada, Great Britain, South Africa and Jamaica and as Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand. It won the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen Award and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. The book was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award and longlisted for both the Giller Prize and the IMPAC Award.

Hill is also the author of the novels Any Known Blood (William Morrow, New York, 1999 and HarperCollins Canada, 1997) and Some Great Thing (HarperCollins 2009, originally published by Turnstone Press, Winnipeg, 1992).

Hill's most recent non-fiction book The Deserter's Tale: the Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq (written with Joshua Key) was released in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and several European countries.

Hill won the National Magazine Award for the best essay published in Canada in 2005 for "Is Africa's Pain Black America's Burden?" (The Walrus, February 2005). In 2005, the 90-minute film document that Hill wrote, Seeking Salvation: A History of the Black Church in Canada, Travesty Productions, Toronto (2004), won the American Wilbur Award for best national television documentary.

Formerly a reporter with The Globe and Mail and parliamentary correspondent for The Winnipeg Free Press, Hill also speaks French and Spanish. He has lived and worked across Canada, in Baltimore, and in Spain and France. As a volunteer with Canadian Crossroads International, he has traveled to the West African countries Niger, Cameroon and Mali. He has a B.A. in economics from Laval University in Quebec City and an M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Hill now lives, writes and runs in Hamilton, Ontario.

Podcast:
Download Show (30:00)