Hill, Lawrence, 1957-....

Lawrence Hill is the son of American immigrants who came to Canada the day after they married in 1953 in Washington, D.C. The story of how they met, married, left the United States and raised a family in Toronto is described in Hill's bestselling memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (HarperCollins Canada, 2001). 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. His third novel was published as The Book of Negroes in Canada, Great Britain, South Africa and India and as Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and won numerous literary awards, including the overall Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Hill is also the author of the novels Any Known Blood (William Morrow, New York, 1999 and HarperCollins Canada, 1997) and Some Great Thing (Turnstone Press, Winnipeg, 1992).