Ernest Hillen
BornNetherlands
Occupationjournalist, writer
NationalityCanadian
Genrememoir
Notable worksThe Way of a Boy, Small Mercies

Ernest Hillen is a Canadian writer and journalist.[1] A longtime editor with Saturday Night,[1] he became best known for two memoirs which he published in the 1990s about his childhood experiences during World War II.[2]

Background

Hillen was born in the Netherlands in 1934 as the child of a Canadian mother and a Dutch father,[3] and the family moved to West Java, Indonesia when he was a child.[2] However, following the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies in 1942, the family was confined to detention camps for several years.[2] After the war ended the family moved between Canada, the Netherlands and Indonesia for several years until the 1950s, when Hillen moved to Toronto.[2]

Writing career

He took his first job in journalism with the German-language newspaper Torontoer Zeitung,[2] and was later a contributor to Weekend, The Idler, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and The Wall Street Journal before joining Saturday Night.[2]

While with Saturday Night, he wrote his first piece of personal journalism about his childhood.[4] The piece, titled "The Swimming Pool", appeared in the 1990 anthology The Saturday Night Traveller.[4] During his career, he also wrote a number of radio plays for CBC Radio.[1]

His first book-length memoir, The Way of a Boy, was published in 1993 and detailed his childhood experiences in Indonesia.[2] The book was a shortlisted nominee for the Trillium Book Awards in 1994.[5] In 1995, the Japanese publishing company Kodansha bought the rights to release a translated Japanese language edition of the memoir, making it one of the first accounts of the Indonesian occupation ever published in that country.[6]

A sequel, Small Mercies: A Boy After War, was published in 1997,[7] and won the inaugural Viacom Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.[8]

In 2008, Hillen published A Weekend Memoir, about his experiences travelling across Canada as a journalist. Both The Way of a Boy and Small Mercies were also reissued that year.[9]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Author bullies boyhood memories". Ottawa Citizen, September 21, 1993.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "One boy's war: Ernest Hillen's childhood was spent as prisoner of the Japanese. His mother was -and is- his rock". Toronto Star, August 29, 1993.
  3. ↑ "Marriage led to adventures: Japanese prisoner of war lived in Indonesia with tea planter husband". National Post, June 4, 2002.
  4. 1 2 "Travel Books: The Saturday Night Traveller". The Globe and Mail, September 19, 1990.
  5. ↑ "Local authors among Trillium nominees". Ottawa Citizen, March 2, 1994.
  6. ↑ "Canadian book to tell Japanese of wartime misery" Tokyo publisher buys rights to story of Dutch interned in Indonesia". The Globe and Mail, January 16, 1995.
  7. ↑ "Floating through boyhood". The Globe and Mail, December 6, 1997.
  8. ↑ "Canadian authors honored by prizes". Calgary Herald, January 20, 1998.
  9. ↑ "50 Books to See You Through the Summer". National Post, June 21, 2008.
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