OnWords

LAWRENCE HILL is the award-winning and internationally bestselling author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Book of Negroes, which was made into a six-part TV mini-series, and The Illegal, both of which won CBC Canada Reads. His previous novels, Some Great Thing and Any Known Blood, became national bestsellers. Hill’s nonfiction work includes Blood: The Stuff of Life, the subject of his 2013 Massey Lectures, and the memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. In January 2022, HarperCollins Canada will publish Hill’s eleventh book -- the novel Beatrice and Croc Harry.
Hill’s volunteer work has included Crossroads International, the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, Book Clubs for Inmates, The Ontario Black History Society, and Walls to Bridges – a non-profit group offering university courses to incarcerated Canadians. A professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph, he has spent more than a decade volunteering in book clubs in federal penitentiaries. Through Walls to Bridges, he taught a third-year undergraduate memoir writing course to women incarcerated in the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener ON.
Currently, Hill is writing screenplays for a TV miniseries in development, as well as a new novel about the thousands of African-American soldiers who travelled from military bases in the Deep South to help build the Alaska Highway in northern British Columbia and Yukon during World War Two. He is a member of the Order of Canada, and a winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and (for screenwriting) a co-winner of the NAACP Award and a Canadian Screen Award. He lives with his wife, the writer Miranda Hill, in Hamilton ON and in Woody Point, NL.