Acclaimed author to host event at UNBC

Critically-acclaimed and award-winning author Lawrence Hill will host a book reading and discussion at the University of Northern British Columbia.

The event is set for Wednesday in the Canfor Winter Garden, starting at 6 p.m. with a reception, book sales and signing.

Then, starting at 7 p.m., Hill will read excerpts from his novels The Book of Negroes and The Illegal and discuss his current research and the subject of his next novel on black American soldiers sent north after Pearl Harbor to build the Alaska Highway.

A creative writing professor at the University of Guelph, Hill is the author of 10 books and has won numerous awards including The Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and is a two-time winner of CBC Radio's Canada Reads.

Hill also co-wrote the adaptation of the six-part TV miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers in Canada and the United States and won 11 Canadian Screen Awards in 2016.

And he delivered the 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life.

Hill will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree at the UNBC convocation on Friday.