By Lawrence Hill

“When Big Issues Come to Bedtime”

The Globe and Mail, January 8, 2022

Lawrence Hill wrote an essay for The Globe and Mail about turning a bedtime story for his daughter into a novel featuring girl versus crocodile.

Sensitivity. A play commissioned by Obsidian Theatre, Toronto, February 2021

CBC Gem (available for free streaming until February 2022)

As part of Obsidian Theatre’s 21 Black Futures project, Lawrence Hill wrote this 10-minute play. Sabryn Rock is the actor and Mike Payette, the director.

“Writing to Build Community”

Write magazine, The Writers’ Union Of Canada, Winter 2021

Lawrence Hill contributed this essay to a special issue on Black Canadian writing in Write, the magazine of The Writers’ Union of Canada. The Winter 2021 issue was guest-edited by Chelene Knight.

“Crossing Paths”

Kobo Originals and The West End Phoenix, July 2020

On his daily walks with his dog, Munro, author Lawrence Hill grapples with the reluctance of some folks to step aside during the pandemic. This article first appeared in Telegrams from Home, Vol 2.: The New Normal.

Lawrence Hill reflects on his relationship with his father and with his own children

CBC, June 18, 2020

Lawrence Hill’s essay on fatherhood and on his relationship with his own father, Daniel G. Hill III, first appeared in the book Forty Fathers: Men Talk About Parenting, Editor: Tessa Lloyd, Douglas & McIntyre, 2019.

“Good Riddance Aunt Jemima, and Goodbye to Uncle Ben Too”

The Globe and Mail, June 18, 2020

Quaker Oats finally announces that it will do away with the Aunt Jemima brand of syrup and pancake mix. It came 131 years too late, but Hallelujah anyway!

“Vote That Willy Lump Lump Out of the White House”

Macleans, June 4, 2020

In the wake of protests against anti-Black violence, Lawrence Hill writes an imaginary letter to his late father, the trailblazing human rights activist Daniel G. Hill.

“Act of Love: the Life and Death of Donna Mae Hill”

The Globe and Mail, June 1, 2018

Lawrence Hill remembers  the life and the medically assisted death of his activist mother, Donna Mae Hill.

“How Harper Lee Helped Canadians Ignore Racism in Our Own Backyard”

The Globe and Mail, February 1, 2016

Harper Lee, a giant of American literature, died Friday. What do her life and her work mean to Canadians, as we move through the ever-shifting sands of racial politics and try to define and better understand our past and our present? 

“Removed from immediacy of childhood, Go Set a Watchman less powerful than Mockingbird”

The Globe and Mail, July 14, 2015

No American novel has had a more seminal influence on our perception of racial injustice, and of the need to oppose it, than Harper Lee’sTo Kill a Mockingbird. First published in 1960, and set in the Great Depression in the early 1930s in the fictional Maycomb County in Alabama, To Kill a Mockingbird created two of the most memorable characters in 20th-century literature ... It has been assumed for decades that Mockingbird would be Lee’s only book: An instant bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winner that has been translated into more than 40 languages. But the book we think of as her first turns out to be her second ... In a way, it helps to see Go Set a Watchman as an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird — a draft written before she figured out the story she really had to tell.

“What I Learned About Language When I Titled My Novel The Book of Negroes”

Slate.com, February 13, 2015

In 2007, shortly before the first printing of the novel in the United States, my American publisher (W.W. Norton & Co.) changed the title to Someone Knows My Name. I was told that American bookstores were reluctant to order a book with the word Negroes on the cover. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, where the Canadian title was translated quite literally to Het Negerboek, a small group of protesters of Dutch Surinamese descent was so outraged that they burned copies of the book cover in an Amsterdam park. When, back in the States, BET bought a six-part miniseries adaptation of the story ..., the network opted to use my original title, which persuaded Norton to re-release the book as The Book of Negroes. This back-and-forth made me wonder: What is it with the word Negroes? How has it come to be so incendiary?

“Adaptation: Rewriting The Book of Negroes for the Small Screen” 

The Walrus, December 15, 2014

We novelists crave legitimacy. If a filmmaker acquires the rights to your book, that means you’re doing well—that you deserve a smidgen of respect. There are few ways for us to get ahead; we have been known to take on all manner of ignoble work in order to buy cheese and bread. I have written for newspapers, penned speeches for politicians I’d never support with my ballot, taught creative writing, led bicycle tours and canoe trips, washed dishes, and worked as a train operator. Trust me: selling film rights beats all of the above.

“Chains Unearthed”

Literary Review of Canada, May, 2014

A review of Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage, by Marcel Trudel, translated by George Tombs

“Meet You at the Door”

The Walrus, September 12, 2012

This happened back in the dinosaur days, in the town of Gull Lake, population 800. The gulls had all died, and if ever there had been a lake it had dried up. On the Saskatchewan farmlands, oil pumps bobbed up and down, up and down, looking like black grasshoppers on speed. Folks were fuming about the metric system and had a nickname for the new top-loading railway car: a Trudeau hopper. I had other preoccupations. A ghost had chased me out of university and had hounded me for a year in Greece, Italy, France, and Spain. And now I was back in Canada, to take a summer job in a place where I knew no one.

Lawrence Hill on His Late Sister, Karen Louise Hill

Toronto Star, April 3, 2014

Lawrence Hill meditates on the rich, textured and challenging life of his sister, Karen Louise Hill, 1957-2014

“Is Africa’s Pain Black America’s Burden?”

The Walrus , February 2005

In 1895, W.E.B. Du Bois became the first black to obtain a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and argued that only the elite of the African-American middle class, the “talented tenth,” could pull the entire black population out of their collective oppression. Du Bois’s view contrasted sharply with the ideas of Booker T. Washington, a former slave who argued that social change for American blacks could only be achieved from the ground up, through entering the trades and working hard. Both men inspired African-Americans as well as African-Canadians, and the civil rights movement improved conditions for all. Conditions, in Africa, meanwhile, have become increasingly dire—and are increasingly ignored.

The Freedom Seeker

Archives of Ontario, 2007

Father of Lawrence Hill and his siblings singer-songwriter Dan Hill and the late novelist Karen Hill, Daniel G. Hill III — along with his wife Donna Bender Hill — was a pioneer in the fields of human rights and Black history in Canada. The son and grandson of African-American ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Daniel Hill was born in Independence, Missouri in 1923, and served as a Black soldier in the highly segregated American Army in World War II. After the war, he obtained a degree from Howard University, studied in Norway and moved permanently to Canada one day after his interracial marriage to Donna Bender in Washington DC in 1953. They raised their family in Toronto, where Donna worked for the Toronto Labour Committee for Human Rights and where Daniel obtained his PhD in Sociology at the University of Toronto after completing his groundbreaking PhD thesis Negroes in Toronto: A Sociological Study of a Minority Group (1960). Daniel Hill became the first Director and later the chairperson of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, ran a human rights consulting firm, and later served as the Ombudsman of Ontario. Daniel and Donna, along with friends, co-founded the Ontario Black History Society and Daniel Hill's book The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada became the first popular history of African-Canadians. 

On Lawrence Hill

CBC The Current Interview with Matt Galloway on Beatrice and Croc Harry.

Lawrence Hill speaks with Matt Galloway on tackling big issues for little readers. Listen to the radio segment on CBC here.

Toronto Star Interview with Lawrence Hill on Beatrice and Croc Harry.

Toronto Star Books Editor Deborah Dundas interviewed Lawrence Hill about Beatrice and Croc Harry. Read the Toronto Star article here.

CBC announces first look and excerpt of Lawrence Hill’s new novel, Beatrice and Croc Harry.

Read CBC Book’s article here.

Lawrence joins Cheryl Foggo and Natasha Henry for the Ontario Black History Society’s Black History Month Speaker Series, February 2020.

Lawrence Hill joined Cheryl Foggo, writer and director of the NFB film John Ware Reclaimed, and historian Natasha Henry, author of Emancipation Day: Celebrating Freedom in Canada to discuss Black Canadian history.

The video is available on the Ontario Black History Society’s YouTube Channel here.

Lawrence Hill supports HWDSB Kids Need Help to abolish policing in schools program, July 2020.

In June 2020, Lawrence wrote a letter addressed to Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) trustees to abolish its controversial Police Liaison program.

Read the news article in the Hamilton Spectator here.

Lawrence Hill and Chantal Gibson in Conversation at Simon Fraser University, April 27, 2018.

Award-winning poet, visual artist and teacher Chantal Gibson (author of How She Read, Caitlin Press, 2019) engages Lawrence Hill in a conversation about how and why, as a child, he wrote a series of letters to his father about a cat named Smokey. Watch the interview here.

CBC announces The Illegal wins the Canada Reads 2016 competition, March 24, 2016.

“Blood and Belonging in The Book of Negroes” Maclean’s magazine, Jan 4, 2015.

Jane Taber features the The Book of Negroes TV miniseries for The Globe and Mail, January 3, 2015.

Excerpt and interview on Blood: The Stuff of Life Maclean's magazine, September 23, 2013.

Donna Bailey Nurse writes about “Dear Sir: I Intend to Burn Your Book” and Hill's fight against censorship in The Toronto Star, April 26, 2013.

“Why The Book of Negroes Matters”, The Globe and Mail, March 14, 2009.

Brian Jamieson writes about “Lawrence Hill’s Remarkable Teachers”, in Professionally Speaking, March 2010.

“Black + White...equals black”, cover article in Maclean’s Magazine, August 27, 2001.