'It was like a civil war inside to bring it under control and shape it."
Lawrence Hill is talking about his latest work, The Book of Negroes, a sweeping novel about Aminata Diallo, a spirited heroine and 18th-century African whose story spans six decades and three continents.
Sold into slavery and brought to America, where she lives in South Carolina, and later New York at the time of the American War of Independence, she eventually moves to Canada, joining a group of Black Loyalists, freed slaves who were registered in the Book of Negroes for resettlement in Nova Scotia.
Life there is not what had been promised, however, and after 10 years of oppression and bitter winters, she sails back to Africa, to Sierra Leone, in the first "back to Africa" exodus in the history of the Americas. Her final days find her in London, where she helps abolitionists in their fight to put an end to slavery.
A gripping, richly descriptive tale, told in the voice of Aminata, starting when she is stolen from her African village at the age of 11, the book is a breakthrough success for Mr. Hill. Recently the recipient of the £10,000 Best Book Commonwealth Writers Prize, it also won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was on the long list for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel, which is Mr. Hill's seventh book and his third work of fiction, has just been shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the United States. International rights have been sold in all English-speaking markets in the world - the first time for one of his novels.
Mr. Hill, 51, is pleased with his success, but his manner is deliberate, ponderous and understated. Speaking to him provides a glimpse into the business of being a writer and the ways in which his own heritage informs his work.
His late father, Daniel Hill, was African-American and a well-known human-rights activist who escaped the racial tension of the United States to come to Canada in the 1950s. His mother, also American by birth and an activist, is white.
They raised three children in the middle-class Toronto neighbourhood of Don Mills, a milieu that "had a way of squishing the black out of you," as Mr. Hill wrote in his acclaimed 2001 memoir, Black Berry, Sweet Juice.
The story of Aminata Diallo presented itself to him in the early 1990s, he says - before his first novel, Some Great Thing, published in 1992 and his second, Any Known Blood, in 1997. He had come across a scholarly work, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870, by James Walker, a history professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.
"I had taken that book from my father's shelf. I was always taking books from his shelf, to travel with, holding on to them as little pieces of the family home," says Mr. Hill, who has lived across Canada, in the United States and in Europe.
"It was stunning news," he says of that historical record, which was little known outside of academic circles. "I thought, 'How is it that I have never heard of this?' It seemed like one of those classically forgotten Canadian stories, but also a global story."
Still, he didn't feel ready to tackle it. "I wasn't ready, 15 or however many years ago, to tell a story from a woman's point of view," he says. He always knew the protagonist would be a woman, whose life would be full of hardship and determination. "I knew from the word go what she sounded like - what the timbre of her voice was, how she would look, how she would walk. I just had to hang a story on her shoulders."
