Skip to content

Ian Williams is the author of seven acclaimed books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Reproduction and the Raymond Souster Award from the League of Canadian Poets for Word Problems. His poetry collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award, while his short story collection Not Anyone’s Anything won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

Williams completed his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and, after several years teaching poetry in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, returned there as a tenured full English professor, director of the Creative Writing program, and academic advisor for the Massey College William Southam Journalism Fellowship. A former Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Writers Program, Williams has held fellowships or residencies at the American Library in Paris, Vermont Studio Center, Cave Canem, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Palazzo Rinaldi in Italy. He delivered the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say, about rehabilitating conversations. He is a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Judges’ Citation

Mr. Williams is a musician. His words sing like brooks and streams through a virgin forest, laugh like waterfalls, startle and delight along the way with hidden eddies and boils.


See also