[3] He won the 2016 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his novel The Nix.

[5] Hill was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1975, where his grandparents had worked as corn, soybean and cattle farmers.

His family moved constantly when he was growing up — around Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas — as his father worked his way up through management at Kmart.

After two years in Cedar Rapids, he pursued a master of fine arts (MFA) at University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

[6] He travelled across the world to give talks about the first novel, taking time from his paying job as a professor at the University of South Florida, which he quit.