Fireside Chat with Lawrence Hill
Originally presented February 10th, 2022 as part of the 2022 Black History Month Series from McMaster University.
This program is supported by McMaster University's FHS Faculty Affairs, Department of Pediatrics, McMaster's Equity and Inclusion Office, and Faculty of Humanities.
Dr. Lawrence Hill, internationally renowned author, discusses race, identity and belonging in the context of his writing.
Lawrence Hill is the internationally bestselling author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including (most recently) Beatrice and Croc Harry, The Book of Negroes (which was made into a six-part TV mini-series) and The Illegal, both of which won CBC Canada Reads. His previous novels, Some Great Thing and Any Known Blood, also became national bestsellers. Hill’s nonfiction work includes Blood: The Stuff of Life (the subject of his 2013 Massey Lectures), and the memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada.
Hill is a professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph. His volunteer work has included Crossroads International, the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, Book Clubs for Inmates, The Ontario Black History Society, and Walls to Bridges – a non-profit group offering university courses to incarcerated Canadians.
Hill is writing screenplays for a TV miniseries in development, and a novel about the African-American soldiers who help build the Alaska Highway in northern British Columbia and Yukon during World War Two. He is a member of the Order of Canada, and a winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
Lawrence Hill's books are available at: King West Books & A Different Booklist.