Lawrence Hill

Lawrence Hill CM (born January 24, 1957) is an internationally acclaimed Canadian novelist, essayist, and memoirist whose powerful historical landscapes and explorations of biracial identity have positioned him as one of the country's most respected contemporary literary figures. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, and raised in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills, he was profoundly shaped by his parents—American civil rights activists who immigrated to Canada in 1953—and their foundational work in the Canadian human rights movement. Hill vaulted into global literary stardom with his 2007 masterpiece, The Book of Negroes (published internationally as Someone Knows My Name), an epic, award-winning historical saga tracking the survival of a captured West African girl; the blockbuster novel won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, swept CBC's Canada Reads, and was co-adapted by Hill into a highly acclaimed television miniseries. A rare two-time winner of the national Canada Reads competition, his extensive and celebrated bibliography includes the bestselling refugee suspense thriller The Illegal, the historical family dramas Any Known Blood and Some Great Thing, and his influential 2001 biracial memoir, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. Beyond his non-fiction studies like Blood: The Stuff of Life—which formed the basis of his 2013 Massey Lectures—and his 2022 children's novel, Beatrice and Croc Harry, he is a dedicated professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph who uses his platform to passionately advocate for social equity, literacy in prisons, and the preservation of Black history.