Ernest Hillen

Ernest Hillen is a Canadian writer and journalist. A longtime editor with Saturday Night,

Background Hillen was born in the Netherlands in 1934 as the child of a Canadian mother and a Dutch father, and the family moved to West Java, Indonesia when he was a child. The piece, titled "The Swimming Pool", appeared in the 1990 anthology The Saturday Night Traveller. 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.

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

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. A Memoir in Pieces, published in 2017, continued in the same vein as A Weekend Memoir, with profiles of Canadians prominent in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, such as Bob Homme (The Friendly Giant) and singer Alannah Myles, as well as accounts of his travels as a journalist and childhood in Indonesia.