Presented by SFU Library & SFU Faculty of Education, join us to hear Lawrence Hill discuss his new work in conversation with David Chariandy on Monday, June 20, 4:30-6:00 PM at SFU Harbour Centre.

Award-winning author, Lawrence Hill will talk about his debut novel for young readers, Beatrice and Croc Harry. Using playful language and a comic touch, the novel explores themes of identity, resistance, and the courage to confront racial injustice. 

David Chariandy, SFU English professor and author of I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter, joins Hill for a conversation about writing to and for young Black people, the complexities of identity and community, and what we can learn from the defiant hopefulness of youth. 

Lawrence Hill

Lawrence Hill is the award-winning and internationally bestselling author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including 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’s eleventh book -- the novel Beatrice and Croc Harry – was published by HarperCollins Canada earlier this year.

Hill’s 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. A professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph, he has spent more than a decade volunteering in book clubs in federal penitentiaries. Through Walls to Bridges, he taught a third-year undergraduate memoir writing course to women incarcerated in the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener ON.

Currently Hill is writing screenplays for a TV miniseries in development, as well as a new novel about the thousands of African-American soldiers who travelled from military bases in the Deep South to 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, and (for screenwriting) a co-winner of the NAACP Award and a Canadian Screen Award. He lives with his wife, the writer Miranda Hill, in Hamilton ON and in Woody Point, NL.

David Chariandy

David Chariandy teaches literature and creative writing in the department of English at Simon Fraser University.

His first novel, Soucouyant, was nominated for the Governor General’s Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His second novel, Brother, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Toronto Book Prize. Brother was also named a book of the year by The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star, The Montreal Gazette, The New York City Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, Esquire Magazine, and The Guardian. His most recent book is a memoir entitled I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You: A Letter To My Daughter.

David’s writings have been published internationally and translated into a dozen languages. In 2019, he was awarded Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. In fall 2022, a feature film based on Brother and directed by Clement Virgo will be released.

More Beatrice and Croc Harry events with Lawrence Hill

This event is part of a series of events about Beatrice and Croc Harry. Join Vancouver Public Library and Belzberg Library on June 20, 10:15am PT, for an online kid-focused event with Lawrence Hill, hosted by Chantal Gibson. Learn more and register through Vancouver Public Library.