Lawrence Hill

Lawrence Hill
Born	1957 (age 59)
Occupation	Novelist, non-fiction writer
Nationality	Canadian
Period	1990s–present
Notable works	Black Berry, Sweet Juice, The Book of Negroes

Lawrence Hill (born 1957) is a Canadian novelist, essayist and memoirist. He is best known for his 2013 Massey Lectures Blood: The Stuff of Life, his 2007 novel The Book of Negroes and his 2001 memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada.

Hill was born in Newmarket, Ontario, to American immigrants – a black father and white mother – who moved to Toronto from Washington, D.C., in 1953.

Hill served as chair of the jury for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Hill was born in 1957 in Newmarket, Ontario. On his father's side, Hill's grandfather and great grandfather were university-educated, ordained ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Hill's father, Daniel G. Hill, became the first director and later the chairperson of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Daniel Hill also served as the Ombudsman of Ontario and published a still seminal work about Black history in Canada: The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada. Hill's mother, Donna M. Hill, came from a Republican family in Oak Park, Illinois, graduated from Oberlin College and later went on to become a civil rights activist in Washington, D.C. Donna Hill worked as a human rights activist for the Toronto Labor Committee for Human Rights in the early 1950s and worked to persuade the Ontario government to enact anti-discrimination legislation. Also writing on Black history: A Black Man's Toronto, 1914-1980: The Reminiscences of Harry Gaiery, Donna Hill's book was published in 1980 by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario.

Daniel and Donna Hill co-founded The Ontario Black History Society with Wilson O. Brooks and other friends. Their second son, Lawrence Hill grew up in the predominantly white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario in the sixties with his brother, singer-songwriter and writer Dan Hill and sister, the late Karen Hill (1958-2014), who wrote a novel, short stories, poems and an essay which remain to be published.

...
Wikipedia