Lawrence Hill
Author of Beatrice and Croc Harry, The Illegal and The Book of Negroes
Photo: Beatrice Freedman
Photo: Beatrice Freedman
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. 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.
Hill is the author of eleven books including the novels Beatrice and Croc Harry, The Book of Negroes and The Illegal and the memoir Black Berry Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. Hill is the winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, and both CBC Radio’s Canada Reads and Radio-Canada’s Combat des livres.
— The Washington Post
— Editors’ Choice, Historical Novels Review
“Unputdownable ... The Illegal is a twisting, intricately woven yarn that spins itself out at an incredible pace... Hill takes on the snarled, pressing issues of our moment in time, including race and discrimination, the movement of refugees across borders and the political fight to define who belongs and who is “an illegal.””
— The Globe and Mail
“The Book of Negroes is a masterpiece, daring and impressive in its geographic, historical and human reach, convincing in its narrative art and detail, necessary for imagining the real beyond the traces left by history...a stunning historical novel that is at once moving, lyrical and shocking, a dazzling neo-slave narrative that spans three continents and blends known events and characters with necessary fictions.”
— The Globe and Mail