Ian Williams

Associate Professor

PhD, University of Toronto

Creative Writing Program

Ian Williams is the author of the novel, Reproduction, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His poetry collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. His story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. You Know Who You Are was a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. He was named as one of ten Canadian writers to watch by CBC.

Ian completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto. He was the 2014-2015 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Writers Program. He has held fellowships or residencies from the Banff Center, Vermont Studio Center, Cave Canem, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Palazzo Rinaldi in Italy.

Primary Recipient Awards

Wall Scholars Program, Ian Williams, 2018

Primary Recipient Ian Williams

Program Wall Scholars Program

While at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, Prof. Williams worked on a grammatically preoccupied poetry collection that reinvigorates our contemporary syntax, emerges intelligently from the history of English, borrows from French and Latin, acknowledges the Canadian debt to Indigeneity, and finally embraces the permanent digital reformations to our language (JL)—all of this to represent our distinctly contemporary feelings of omnipresent low-grade anxiety.

While at PWIAS, Ian launched his book Reproduction and published his poem "Anthems" in the Institute's book Memory. Williams reflects on the way anthems evolve as our values shift in this interview on the CBC's North by Northwest. Listen to the interview here.