Lawrence Hill (born January 24, 1957, in Newmarket, Ontario) is an award-winning Canadian novelist, essayist, memoirist, and professor whose work explores themes of identity, belonging, and the historical experiences of Black people. The son of American immigrants—a Black father, Daniel Grafton Hill, and a white mother, Donna Hill—he grew up in the predominantly white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario. His parents’ activism in the civil rights movement and their contributions to Black Canadian history, including his father’s book The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada (1981), profoundly shaped Hill’s perspective and writing.
Hill earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Université Laval in Québec City and a master’s degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University. Before gaining international acclaim, he worked as a journalist and published short fiction and essays in outlets like The Walrus, where his 2005 essay “Is Africa’s Pain Black America’s Burden?” won a National Magazine Award. His early novels, Some Great Thing (1992) and Any Known Blood (1997), explored multiracial identity, a theme he revisited in his memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (2001).
Hill’s third novel, The Book of Negroes (HarperCollins Canada, 2007), published as Someone Knows My Name in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, brought him widespread recognition. Inspired by the historical “Book of Negroes,” a British naval ledger documenting Black Loyalists who fled to Canada during the American Revolutionary War, the novel follows Aminata Diallo, an African woman abducted into slavery who seeks freedom across three continents. The book won numerous accolades, including the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and both CBC Radio’s Canada Reads (2009) and Radio-Canada’s Le Combat des livres (2013). It was adapted into a six-part TV miniseries in 2015, co-written by Hill and director Clement Virgo, earning eleven Canadian Screen Awards and an NAACP award for best writing.
Hill has authored eleven books, including the novels The Illegal (2015), which won Canada Reads in 2016, and Beatrice and Croc Harry (2022), as well as non-fiction works like Blood: The Stuff of Life (2013), the basis for his 2013 Massey Lectures, and Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book (2013). His writing, translated into multiple languages, often addresses overlooked aspects of Black history and the complexities of race. A professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph, Hill is also a dedicated volunteer, supporting organizations like Crossroads International and the Black Loyalist Heritage Society. He founded the Aminata Fund to aid programs for women and girls in Africa. Hill has received nine honorary doctorates from Canadian universities and is a Member of the Order of Canada. He lives with his family in Hamilton, Ontario, and Woody Point, Newfoundland.