Lawrence Hill

Lawrence Hill was born on 24 January 1957 in Newmarket, Ontario, the son of two prominent figures in the human rights movement. His father, Daniel Grafton Hill, was the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the author of The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada (1981). Hill is the grandson and son of African-American soldiers who served in the two world wars, and his parents' work deeply influenced his writing.

He is a graduate of the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. His work has explored Black history in Canada and around the world, slavery and freedom, human rights, migration, the search for home, mixed-race identity and blood as a marker of individual and collective identity.

His third novel, The Book of Negroes (2007), published in the United States, Australia and New Zealand as Someone Knows My Name, and in French as Aminata, tells the story of Aminata Diallo, an African woman abducted as a child and taken into slavery, whose story is based on the real Book of Negroes, a British document recording the freed Black Loyalists who were allowed to leave New York for Nova Scotia in 1783. It won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and Canada Reads, and has been published in at least ten countries.

In 2015 the novel was adapted as a six-part television miniseries co-written by Hill and the director Clement Virgo, which drew millions of viewers on CBC and BET, and won eleven Canadian Screen Awards and an NAACP award for best writing. In 2011 Hill received an email from a man in the Netherlands announcing that he planned to burn the book, which drew international attention and led to his 2013 essay Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book: An Anatomy of a Book Burning.

Hill delivered the 2013 CBC Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life, and has also published the novels The Illegal (2015) and Beatrice and Croc Harry (2022). He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph, holds honorary doctorates from ten Canadian universities, and was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2015 for his contributions as an author and activist who tells the stories of Canada's Black community.