Lawrence Hill is the son of American immigrants 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. 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 has authored ten books of fiction and non-fiction. In 2005, he won his first honour for his work, a National Magazine Award for the article “Is Africa’s Pain Black America’s Burden?” published in The Walrus. It was his 2007 novel, The Book Of Negroes that brought his writing to broad public attention. The novel won several awards, including The Rogers/Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, both CBC Radio’s Canada Reads and Radio Canada’s Le Combat des Livres, and The Commonwealth Prize for Best Book. The Book of Negroes television miniseries, which Hill co-wrote with director Clement Virgo, was filmed in South Africa and Canada and aired on CBC in Canada and on BET in the United States in early 2015.
Hill’s non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life was published in September 2013. Hill drew from the book to deliver the 2013 Massey Lectures across Canada. His fourth novel, The Illegal, was published in 2015.
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.
