Special Profile: Lawrence Hill

A life less ordinary

“I feel, oddly, a bit like a gate crasher,” says Lawrence Hill during a moment of enforced navel gazing, still pinching himself after landing the Overall 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, enchanting critics and earning an audience with The Queen.

A born storyteller and modest to the core – at 52, counting himself lucky to have ‘developed as an adult, father and writer’, with seven books under his belt, before, as he puts it, ‘things blew out’ on the international literary stage – he recalls sitting in his editor’s office in Toronto learning she received 35 unsolicited manuscripts per day.

“That’s unsolicited,” he repeats. “When she told me that, a part of me really felt like a gate crasher. How did I get in?”

It is this side of Lawrence Hill – the ‘ordinary man’ called Larry – that is most striking.

Writing is the only work he has ever wanted to do in that ‘this is how I make sense of the world and my place in it’ way, aside from an early obsession with athletics and dream of winning Olympic gold in the 5,000-metre middle distance event.

Embracing the ‘emotional saving grace of humour’, with a hint of the blinding determination of his youth, Mr Hill retorts: “I knew exactly how I was going to win that race and where I would leave my rival in the dust! Sadly, my physical ability didn’t match my dreams, and that was a painful discovery, although fortunately it led me to look at something to do for pleasure in life. I’m still a big runner.”

Through it all, writing has been his constant companion – ‘a habit’ once supported by a string of jobs: canoe scout, bicycle tour guide, dish washer, customs officer, political speech writer and journalist.

“I made a calculated deal with the Devil,” he jokes. “To bring in income while I was developing as a writer. I suppose occasionally there may be a person who waltzes into the world of publishing and the first novel is a hit, but expecting that to happen is like expecting you’re going to win a massive lottery ticket.

“The best you can do is develop your craft and see what happens.”

In Lawrence Hill’s case, what happened, according to the cacophony of literary reviews surrounding his Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-winning novel, The Book of Negroes, is ‘a masterpiece’, ‘a harrowing, breathtaking tour de force’, and ‘one of those very rare novels in which the deep joy of reading transcends its time and place’.

Now available in UK bookstores – following its January 2009 release by Doubleday – the epic novel dramatises an all but forgotten story of eighteenth century Africans forced into slavery in the Americas, liberated after many years and returned to the mother continent in the same lifetime.

Written in the voice of a woman called Aminata Diallo, who, as Lawrence Hill points out, has the most to lose – a midwife who catches other people’s babies only to lose her own; abducted at the age of 11 from her home in Mali; sold into slavery in America; freed in Canada (yet still meeting segregation and abuse); relocated to Sierra Leone to help set up the colony of Freetown, before ending her days in London – The Book of Negroes spent 13 weeks on Canada’s bestseller list following its 2007 release.

Published in the US under a different title, Someone Knows My Name, it also won the 2007 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; was longlisted for the Giller Prize; named one of the top 100 books of the year by The Globe and Mail; ranked by Amazon in Canada among the year’s best 25 works of literature; and earned Lawrence Hill the title of author of the year at the Canadian Booksellers Association’s Libris Awards.

The novel has also been longlisted for the prestigious 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award – the world’s richest literary prize, last year won by Bierut-born Montréaler, Rawi Hage, for his debut novel De Niro’s Game (Read» a special Canada Focus profile on Rawi Hage).

Not bad for a gate crasher.

Truth be known, Lawrence Hill’s first literary prize came at the tender age of seven, when, in response to numerous pleas for a kitten, his father directed him to write a convincing letter ‘with no spelling mistakes’.

“He sent me up to my room and told me to give due consideration to why I deserved to have this cat, whose allowance would pay for it, how I would stop it having babies in the closet – and to make this letter a good one.

“It was a good exercise because I had to impress someone. I had to argue in a substantive way that would change my father’s mind – not just abstract stuff, but something with sharp purpose . . . and that is the best way to write.”

The rest, of course, is history. The young Larry got his cat – a grey tabby called ‘Smokey’ – with his father, unwittingly nudging him towards a course as a writer.

The second of three children, raised in the predominantly white, middle-class suburb of Don Mills, Ontario, in the 1960s, Lawrence Hill was soon ‘writing fiendishly’, forming proper short stories by the age of 14, bent over a typewriter, only to rip them up and start again.

“They were terrible,” he says. “I’d be ashamed to have them seen.”

Style aside, the substance was vital. His adolescent stories about racial identity and mixed race relationships – ‘people struggling to get together, to cross racial divides and form relationships’ – helped him understand his own identity.

“I was sorting things out,” he says frankly, the son of an African American father and civil rights activist, white mother, who met in Washington DC, married in 1953, and immigrated the next day to Canada, leaving behind the segregated America of their youth.

Recognised as a pioneer in the field of human rights in Canada, Lawrence Hill’s father, Daniel Grafton Hill III, became the first director and chairman of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and, later, the province’s ombudsman. He also co-founded the Ontario Black History Society from the family basement in 1978.

“My father, like many immigrants, believed that education and success would help his children overcome social injustices,” says Mr Hill. “He was obsessed by the idea that we should become high-achieving professionals – doctors, lawyers or engineers. But his strategy backfired because he also told us fantastic stories: preposterous and exaggerated stories, cooked up at the foot of the bed.”

As ‘the classic middle child’, Lawrence Hill seemed set to succeed along the lines expected of him.

“That was until I decided I was not going to become an economist and I was going to write,” he says, in the same breath adding that it was his older brother, Dan, who paved the way as the family’s trail blazing rebel.

At the age of 17, Dan Hill dropped out of school to pursue a career as a singer/songwriter, best known for his 1977 ballad ‘Sometimes When We Touch’.

“What he did was not only slightly unorthodox, but completely revolutionary in my father’s eyes.”

In the end, however, all three Hill children embraced the arts, with younger sister Karen, an aspiring poet.

Looking back, Lawrence Hill also parallels his parents’ decision to start a new life in Canada, with his destiny as a writer.

“I don’t know that I would have been a writer if I was raised in the United States,” he explains. “My cousins would not have had to ask themselves whether they were black or to what degree they would be part of black culture.

“But, by moving to Canada, my parents increased the likelihood that we would become artists because we had to cope with ambiguity in place of the absolutes that they fled.

“Growing up in Toronto, in a predominantly white suburb, I had to make sense of myself in a mixed race family and how this related to my identity. That’s what spurred me to become a writer. An ambiguous setting is a good circumstance in which to write.”

Surrounded by his parents’ collection of books – hundreds of volumes, mostly to do with black culture and black history – it was in his mid-twenties that Lawrence Hill stumbled upon an historical account, published in 1977, entitled ‘The Black Loyalists’, in turn leading him to the historical ledger, the ‘Book of Negroes’, which planted the seed for his bestselling novel.

The original 150-page ledger, created by the Royal British Navy, contains biographical information about thousands of African Americans who fled slavery to serve the British, who promised to liberate them in return for service during the American Revolution. When the British lost the war, in 1783, they sent those Black Loyalists who could show they had served for at least one year to Nova Scotia, Canada.

“This historical document was as much a discovery to me when I was researching the novel as it is now to the readers who are finding out about it,” says Mr Hill, who visited the National Archives, in Kew, where the original document is stored, during a recent visit to the UK, including a reading at Canada House and audience with The Queen at Buckingham Palace.

“It was emotionally overwhelming,” he says of the experience. “It drilled home the point that a novel is waiting to be written for every one of the 3,000 names in the ‘Book of Negroes’. I’m so fortunate to have come up with one.”

Here, in his humble, honest way, he adds there was a point when writing the novel – a five year process – that he questioned his creative vision to pull it off.

“It was a very difficult book to write,” he says, having imagined the face of Aminata a decade before he began writing, giving her the name of his eldest daughter to ‘love her sufficiently to lift her off the page’.

“When I first started thinking about the book, I knew I was not developed enough as a writer to tackle it. Nor would I have been emotionally ready to send shafts of light through the story to counterbalance the darkness of it all, and not succumb to depression by dwelling so long in that nightmare.”

He attributes much of the novel’s success to a colliding of the worlds of fiction and history, replete with ‘historical nuggets’.

Here, he says his father, who passed away in 2003, would have been ‘tickled pink’ by the thought that his son, during an audience at Buckingham Palace on the coat tails of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, ‘told The Queen and thing or two about British history’.

“The Queen was so gracious and made me feel very comfortable, and she was fascinated by the history underpinning the book,” he says, also drawing a ‘life imitates art’ link to the novel, with Aminata meeting the British monarch towards the end of her life, appealing for an end to slavery.

Inheriting the storytelling wiles of his father, his audience with The Queen also provided a rich bed of material – fantastical and exaggerated – to entertain his own five children.

“The Queen has this button in her apartment on the second floor. A silver/grey button about twice the size of a navel, and when her hand hovers over this button, you know she’s getting ready to send you out.

“So, the challenge is a bit like Sheherazade, to hold her hand off the button, and the kids found that hilarious.”

Here’s hoping Lawrence Hill has at least a thousand and one more stories to come.

Read an excerpt» from The Book of Negroes

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