Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes

Lawrence Hill is one of Canada’s great storytellers — confronting historical narratives of race, memory and history. The author of several books of both fiction and non-fiction, Hill is best known for his award-winning and bestselling novel, The Book of Negroes. Hill is the son of American immigrants — a black father and white mother — who came to Canada in the fifties. Growing up in a predominantly white suburb, Hill was greatly influenced by his parents’ work in the human rights movement. Much of his writing touches on issues of identity and belonging. For this Big Thinking event, Hill will reveal how he integrated his research about the Black Loyalists into The Book of Negroes, an epic story that imagines an eighteenth century African woman’s migrations back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, spanning Mali, South Carolina, Manhattan, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone and London.

Lawrence Hill - Faction: The merging of history and fiction in The Book of


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