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, which was the winner of CBC Canada Reads. His previous novels, Some Great Thing and Any Known Blood, 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 volunteer work has included Crossroads International, the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, Book Clubs for Inmates, The Ontario Black History Society, and The Writers' Union of Canada. He lives with his family in Hamilton, Ontario, and Woody Point, Newfoundland. Hill’s new novel for children, Beatrice and Croc Harry, will be published in 2022. A professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph in Ontario, he is working on 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.