Canadian author Lawrence Hill got to do something that most writers never will: he was granted a private audience with Queen Elizabeth to discuss his award-winning book,
Someone
Knows My Name. Hill won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in May for overall best book, which included an audience with the Queen as part of the winner's prize. The story follows the life of a kidnapped 11 year old West African girl who is sold into slavery in North Carolina.
"(The chat) was great actually, it was really an honour. She was much more conversational and relaxed than I had imagined that she would be, so I was able to enjoy myself and feel I was speaking to not just a queen but an ordinary person in conversation," he said.
"Most of the conversation had to do with the historical questions the book explores, and she was really quite struck (by the story)."
*****
"The Queen was fascinated to hear this document is housed in its original version in the National Archives here in the U.K., in Kew, just a short distance from Buckingham Palace, so she wanted to know more about this document," Hill said.
She also asked him what it's like to be a writer, and she spoke about her visits to Canada and how she imagines it would be a "wonderful" place to live, Hill said.
Outside the U.S., the novel is titled The Negroes. The book
was inspired by the real Book of Negroes, an 18th-century document that recorded the names of black people who fled the United States for Nova Scotia.
