Lawrence Hill: Someone Knows My Name

Lawrence Hill

Lawrence Hill is the son of American immigrants - a black father and a white mother - who came to Canada the day after they married in 1953 in Washington, D.C. On his father's side, Hill's grandfather and great-grandfather were university-educated, ordained ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His mother came from a Republican family in Oak Park, Illinois, graduated from Oberlin College and went on to become a civil rights activist in 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. Growing up in the predominantly white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario in the 1960s, 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.

Lawrence Hill's 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 United States, Australia and New Zealand. It won the overall Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Ontario Library Association's Evergreen Award and CBC Radio's Canada Reads. The book was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award and longlisted for both the Giller Prize and the IMPAC Award.

Hill is also the author of the novels Any Known Blood and Some Great Thing.