Ernest Hillen

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]

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]