TheCongress of Black Women, Waterloo Region and Kitchener Public Library are pleased to host Lawrence Hill talking about his debut novel for young readers, Beatrice and Croc Harry.

Registration is required for this event, please visit: 85: Queen Lawrence Hill 

"At once a perfectly delightful childhood adventure story and a heart-wrenching tale about very real, very current events, and the power of friendship and forgiveness to help heal divides at a time when we need it most. Lawrence Hill engages the reader with whimsy and humour, then slowly peels back the layers to some harder truths beneath. I loved this book so much."

                                                          - Susin Nielsen, author of Tremendous Things and We Are All Made of Molecules

Beatrice, a young girl of uncertain age, wakes up all alone in a treehouse in the forest. How did she arrive in this cozy dwelling, stocked carefully with bookshelves and oatmeal accouterments? And who has been leaving a trail of clues, composed in delicate purple handwriting?

So begins the adventure of a brave and resilient Black girl’s search for identity and healing in bestselling author Lawrence Hill’s middle-grade debut. Though Beatrice cannot recall how or why she arrived in the magical forest of Argilia—where every conceivable fish, bird, mammal and reptile coexist, and any creature with a beating heart can communicate with any other—something within tells her that beyond this forest is a family that is waiting anxiously for her return.

Lawrence Hill is a writer whose novels and works of non-fiction have been widely read in Canada, translated into many languages and published around the world.  He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph and has served as a teacher or mentor to developing writers for thirty years.

Hill is the son of American civil rights activists – an African-American father and white mother – who married in the South and moved the next day to Canada, where they spent the rest of their lives, raised a family, wrote books about Black history in Canada, and continued their civil rights activism. Lawrence Hill’s grandfather and father were African-American soldiers in the US Army in World Wars I and II, respectively. Hill’s father, Daniel G. Hill, served as the first director and later was the Chair of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. He also served as Ombudsman of Ontario. With his wife Donna Hill, he co-founded the Ontario Black History Society, for which Lawrence Hill volunteered.

Lawrence Hill is the winner of various awards including the National Magazine Award for best feature article (“Is Africa’s Pain Black American’s Burden?”), The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for his novel The Book of Negroes, and twice has won CBC Radio’s Canada Reads as well as Radio-Canada’s Le Combat des livres. He is the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Popular Media and the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize.

Hill graduated from the University of Toronto Schools in 1975. He served as school captain in his final year at the high school. He has a B.A. in economics from Université Laval in Quebec City and an M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He has received honorary doctorates from ten Canadian universities.

An inductee into Canada’s Walk of Fame and a Member of the Order of Canada, he lives with his wife, the writer Miranda Hill, in Hamilton ON and in Woody Point NL. 


Signed copies of Beatrice and Croc Harry are available for purchase at Words Worth Books 

This event is part of the library's Black Heritage Month programs and events