Ian Williams has published four books in three genres — each one either a finalist or the winner of a major literary prize. True to form, in November 2019, his debut novel Reproduction won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s biggest fiction award, and at $100,000, one of the richest literary prizes in the English-speaking world.

Reproduction, which was also a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, explores the complexities of the modern family through the lens of race, class, and identity. Seven years ago, Ian Williams was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize for his poetry collection, Personals — lyric riffs on personal ads. And the year before that, his short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. His first book of poetry, You Know Who You Are, was shortlisted for the ReLit Award.

Ian holds a Ph.D. in English and teaches poetry in the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. He was the 2014–2015 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Writers Program and has held fellowships and residencies around the world. Recently, he was a scholar at the prestigious US National Humanities Center Summer Institute for Literary Study in North Carolina.

Born in 1979, Ian was raised in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto that embraces a richly diverse population. The protagonist of Reproduction shares those stats with its author, though Ian rejects the notion that his novel is autobiographical. He is currently working on his second novel, Disappointment, made up of strands and ideas cut from his first novel. He is also finishing a new book of poetry.