Lawrence Hill speaking at the Capitol Theatre

On Friday, June 15, 2012 at 7pm, Lawrence Hill, the author of the popular novel The Book of Negroes will be at the Chatham Capitol Theatre as special keynote speaker.

During his stay, he will spend some time with local secondary students and visit some of the Black Historical sites in Chatham-Kent as a response to a request from the Promised Land Project–”Claiming The Promise”, which is hosting the event.

Lawrence Hill is the son of American immigrants – a black father and a white mother – who came to Canada the day after they married in 1953 in Washington, D.C

Growing up in the sixties in the predominantly white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario, Hill was greatly influenced by his parents’ work in the human rights movement. Much of Hill’s writing touches on issues of identity and belonging.

Lawrence Hill’s third novel was published as The Book of Negroes in Canada and the UK, and as Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand. It won the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen Award and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. The book was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award and long-listed for both the Giller Prize and the IMPAC Award.

Hill is also the author of the novels Any Known Blood (William Morrow, New York, 1999 and HarperCollins Canada, 1997) and Some Great Thing (HarperCollins 2009, originally published by Turnstone Press, Winnipeg, 1992). Hill’s most recently published fiction is the short story “Meet You at the Door”, which appeared in the January-February 2011 issue of The Walrus magazine.

Tickets for Lawrence Hill are $16.50 (inclusive). To purchase your tickets, call 519-354-8338/toll-free 1-866-807-7770; come in to the box office at 75 William Street North in Chatham; or go on line at www.cktickets.com.