A.W. Hill

Who is A.W. Hill?

A.W. Hill is an American writer of speculative fiction and mystery. He grew up in the Midwest but began writing under the influence of Southern California and has been linked by novelist/essayist Alan Rifkin to the tradition of "California fabulist literature." Hill has published three literary thrillers featuring Los Angeles cult investigator Stephan Raszer, a tracker of missing persons and an expert in emerging religions in the present age of apocalypse. Raszer's preoccupation, as well as his author's, is in "what draws otherwise rational people to believe in unbelievable things."

Hill currently lives in Chicago with his wife, Valerie, and son, Nathanael, and directs the graduate program in Music Composition for the Screen at Columbia College Chicago. He has two daughters, Olivia and Andrea, from a previous marriage. He is a former studio music executive, film music producer, and won a Grammy Award as producer of the Best Musical Album for Children in 2000. He received his BFA in Film from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where he studied screenwriting with Martin Scorsese collaborator Mardik Martin.

In 2003, Hill met Dorris Halsey, then 77, who had been literary agent for, among others, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, Upton Sinclair, and Ben Hecht. In Halsey and her younger partner and protégé, Kimberley Cameron, Hill found champions for both his fiction and his screenwriting work. Halsey took on her "first new client in years" and introduced the writer to those in her circle, including Dr. Mani Lal Bhaumik, with whom Hill developed the memoir Code Name God, and Laura Huxley, with whom he briefly collaborated on a film adaptation of her late husband's novel, The Island. Halsey died in 2006, and Cameron now helms the Reece Halsey Agency.