劳伦斯·希尔

劳伦斯·希尔（英语：Lawrence Hill，1957年—）是一名非洲裔加拿大作家。希尔出生于安大略省的纽马克特，父亲是一名由美国移民到加拿大的黑人，而母亲则是一名白人。希尔分别从拉瓦尔大学取得经济学的学位及从约翰·霍普金斯大学取得写作的硕士学位，毕业后曾在《环球邮报》担任记者。1992年，希尔已经出版了他的第一本小说，但直至2007年，出版了《黑奴书》The Book of Negroes，一本讲述一个马里女奴被卖至美国的故事，他才获得大众的关注，并为他带来多个奖项，当中包括2008年度英联邦作家奖的头奖。新书The illegal 出版在2015年, 作者花了五年时间写这本书。现居住于加拿大哈密尔顿（2016）

Lawrence Hill (born January 24, 1957) is a Canadian novelist, essayist, and memoirist. He is known for his 2007 novel The Book of Negroes, inspired by the Black Loyalists given freedom and resettled in Nova Scotia by the British after the American Revolutionary War, and his 2001 memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. The Book of Negroes was adapted for a TV mini-series produced in 2015. He was selected in 2013 for the Massey Lectures: he drew from his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life, published that year. His ten books include other non-fiction and fictional works, and some have been translated into other languages and published in numerous other countries.

Hill was born in Newmarket, Ontario, to an American couple who had immigrated to Toronto from Washington, D.C., in 1953. His father was black and his mother was white. Hill served as chair of the jury for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Personal life and education

Hill was born in 1957 in Newmarket, Ontario, the second son of Daniel G. and Donna Mae (Bender) Hill, an interracial American couple who had married in 1953 and settled in Toronto, where his father was completing his doctorate in sociology at the University of Toronto. His father, a sociologist, civil servant and activist, later became the first director and chairperson of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Daniel Hill also served as the Ombudsman of Ontario. He published a still seminal work about Black history in Canada: The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada.

Hill's mother, Donna Mae Bender, came from a white Republican family in Oak Park, Illinois, and graduated from Oberlin College. She met his father in Washington, D.C., where she worked for a Democratic US Senator and became a civil rights activist. In the early 1950s in Toronto, Donna Hill worked as a human rights activist for the city's Labor Committee for Human Rights. She lobbied the Ontario government to enact anti-discrimination legislation. She also wrote about Black Canadian history; her A Black Man's Toronto, 1914-1980: The Reminiscences of Harry Gairey (1980) was published 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. Lawrence Hill was born as the second son, and grew up with his brother Dan and sister Karen in the predominantly white Toronto suburb of Don Mills. Dan Hill became a singer-songwriter and writer, and their sister, the late Karen Hill (1958-2014), was also a writer. Her novel, short stories, poems and an essay are still to be published.

Hill's paternal grandfather and great grandfather were university-educated, ordained ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It was founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1816 as the first independent black denomination in the United States.

After attending the University of Toronto Schools, Hill earned a B.A in economics from Laval University in Quebec City. He moved temporarily to the United States to earn an M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Lawrence Hill presently lives with his second wife, the writer Miranda Hill, in Hamilton, Ontario, and in Woody Point, Newfoundland. He has four daughters and a son. He has lived and worked in Baltimore, Maryland; Spain, and France.

Career

Hill taught undergraduate fiction writing while completing his M.A. at Johns Hopkins. Since completing that program, he returned to Canada, where he has taught creative writing or mentored creative writers in numerous adult education programs. These have included The Becoming Ground program at the University of British Columbia, the Humber School for Writers, Sage Hill Writing Experience, and The Banff Centre.