Ian Williams

Assistant Professor

PhD, University of Toronto

Creative Writing

Ian Williams is a poet and fiction writer. His first book, You Know Who You Are, was a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. His second book, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. His third book, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the world’s largest poetry prize. His fourth book, Reproduction, was published by Random House earlier this year. CBC named him as one of ten Canadian writers to watch.

Primary Recipient Awards

Wall Scholars, Ian Williams, 2018

Primary Recipient Ian Williams

Program Wall Scholars

While at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, Prof. Williams will work 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.