Lawrence Gittens Jr. is a Toronto-based literary fiction author whose novels are not inspired by true events — they are true events. The son of immigrant parents from Guyana and Trinidad, he grew up in Toronto’s west end. In a household where reading the room wasn’t a metaphor — it was survival. He learned early to notice what others miss, to understand what is felt but not said, and to hold steady under pressure. He lost his infant sister, Taisha, before he was old enough to understand loss. She stayed with him. She speaks through everything he writes. He has spent decades working in environments where people are at their most exposed — crisis response, emergency medical care, community counselling, and military service. Alongside this, he studied business, digital media arts, governance, and computer science across Canadian institutions. Every discipline sharpened the same instinct: to see people clearly, to name what others avoid, and to tell the truth without softening it. His work speaks to those who have lived through something they were never meant to carry alone — and are still here. His debut novel, In Pieces (2026), follows a woman who spent thirty years walled off from her sister after a moment of childhood guilt — and, at the end of her life, is forced to confront what she buried. It is dedicated to his mother, who buried his sister Taisha before he was old enough to understand death. His second novel, Based on a True Story, is the account he has never been able to stop writing: a boy growing up in a Toronto household shaped by love, survival, and the weight of what is never said — and the long road back to himself. It is dedicated: For Taisha. For the boy in the bus shelter. He is also the author of A Fragile Bliss, Paper Sky, Safe, and Also, I Love You, Bye. His work returns to the same truth. Someone gets up. Someone keeps going. That is who Lawrence Gittens Jr. is. It is also why he writes.