Ian Williams is the second Trinidadian-born writer to win the Giller Prize
December 11, 2019
‘The Circle Game’, award-winning writer Margaret Atwood’s first major collection of poetry published in 1964, was the first book that Ian Williams bought with his own money at a Brampton bookstore.
In his acceptance speech after winning this year’s $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize on November 18, Williams singled out the Canadian literary icon who sat at the table next to his on her 80th birthday.
He didn’t know that the octogenarian, who won the Giller Prize in 1996 for her historical fiction novel, ‘Alias Grace’, would be at the event.
“I think that appreciation is under-valued and we sort of go forward expecting that people know how we feel,” Williams said. “The kind of impact that writers have is hard to measure. She was incredibly important to me growing up.”
He was turned on to Atwood while sifting through his mother’s anthologies. Judy Williams, a primary school teacher, was at the time pursuing a degree part-time at York University.
“I was a precocious kid looking for poetry to read,” the first-time novelist recalled. “My mom had a book on Canadian poetry among her collection, so Atwood was slightly familiar by that point to me.”
‘The Circle Game’, which won a 1966 Governor General’s Award, holds pride of place in Williams office at the University of British Columbia where he’s an Assistant Professor of Poetry since January 2017.
Named one of ten Canadian writers to watch by CBC last year, he won the biggest prize in Canadian Literature for his first novel, ‘Reproduction’, which explores unconventional connections and brilliantly redefines family.
Ian Williams won the 2019 Giller Prize for his first novel, ‘Reproduction’
“As a poet, I am really interested in technical things, so I wanted a book that could reproduce itself,” Williams said. “The other emotional part of that was that I was in my mid-30s and I had just written a book about relationships. So I was thinking about children and where they come from and under what circumstances.”
The five-member jury panel, that included literary critic Donna Bailey Nurse who edited the groundbreaking ‘Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing’, said ‘Reproduction is many things at once’.
“It is an engrossing story of disparate people brought together and also a masterful unfolding of unexpected connections and collisions between and across lives otherwise separated by race, class, gender and geography,” they wrote. “It’s a pointed and often playful plotting out of individual and shared stories in the close spaces of hospital rooms, garages, mansions and apartments and a symphonic performance of resonant and dissonant voices, those of persons wanting to impress, persuade, deny or beguile others, and always trying again.”
Scotiabank Giller Prize Executive Director Elana Rabinovitch said the novel resonated deeply with the jury, evoking time, place and character that only the best works of art can achieve.
“I feel confident that this book will continue to find an even larger and more devoted audience across Canada and throughout the world,” she added.
Prior to writing prose, Williams – who has held fellowships and residencies from the Banff Center, Vermont Studio Center, Cave Canem, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and Palazzo Rinaldi in Italy -- authored three books of Poetry.
‘Personals’ was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroestch Poetry Book Award, ‘Not Anyone’s Anything’ won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada and ‘You Know Who You Are’ was a finalist for the ReLit Prize for Poetry.
After graduating with his PhD from the University of Toronto, Williams taught Literature, but soon found out he was more interested in Creative Writing.
“At the time, U of T didn’t have many Creative Writing courses and I really didn’t know that it was a possibility or an option for one to have a life as a writer,” the former Scholar at the National Humanities Center Summer Institute for Literary Study noted. “I wrote poems on the margins and they came out of lines from Blake, Chaucer and Keats. Whoever we were reading at the time, I felt engaged in that conversation with them across time. It was actually the best kind of education because it wasn’t a direct training into Creative Writing. It was a training into books and to Literature and to kind of a canonical history of ideas, movements and temperaments and that has served, I think, much better than a straight ‘here’s how to write sonnet kind of thing’.”
While surprised that he won the Giller Prize with his debut novel, Williams is very comfortable writing prose.
“I think about all languages being mine,” he said. “Whatever the genre or form, I feel comfortable in it. I enjoy teaching Poetry. It’s a different kind of mindset from writing fiction, but I do all of it. I feel close to just words in general.”
Aspiring to be a pilot while in Trinidad & Tobago where he spent his first six years, Williams completed high school at Mayfield Secondary School in Caledon and three degree programs at the U of T. His doctoral supervisor was celebrated author and poet Dr. George Elliott Clarke who he holds in high esteem.
“This Professor was very busy and famous when I was at U of T,” said Williams who was the 2014-15 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Writers Program. “In fact, he was the only Black male faculty member at the time. I think it is important for students to look up and see someone like themselves. I felt very fortunate to be at the university at the same time that he was there as I had never had a Black teacher or Professor since leaving Trinidad. This was such a bright man with facts, tidbits of information and historical pieces all at his fingertips. He retains a lot of information and is a bit encyclopedic in his approach to living.”
Ian Williams is the second Trinidadian-born writer to win the Giller Prize in the last four years
Williams is also very appreciative of his parents for giving him the latitude to explore options.
His father, Vincent Williams, worked in the oil sector in Trinidad before bringing his family to Canada in the mid-1980s.
“There were always books in our home that I could go through and read, I could sit around for hours and draw if I wanted to and I could play tennis with my dad,” he said. “My parents never said, ‘you could do this or that with your life’. There was a kind of understood trust that this kid is going to be okay from the beginning.”
In between degree programs, Williams spent seven months teaching English in South Korea.
After finishing his doctoral program in 2005, he secured a tenure-track position at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts.
Disaster struck on June 13, 2011 when a six-alarm fire destroyed the five-story building in which Williams resided. He ran out of the burning edifice with just his keys, wallet and cell phone.
Sometimes, tragedies turn out to be blessings in disguise. Faced with the option of rebuilding a life in the United States or Canada, Williams chose the latter and returned north of the border in 2012.
“The United States is a very difficult place for a Black man,” he said. “Americans want you to receive African-American History although you are not African-American. It is very hard for them to see other forms of Blackness. Slavery brought us to this continent, but our experiences in these very specific cultural contexts shape a different kind of Blackness. The other thing is I was crossing the border recently and the female immigration officer didn’t say ‘Hello’ or ‘Good Morning’. The first words out of her mouth were, ‘Have you ever been arrested?’ I can’t live in a country that does that to you all the time.”
Williams’ next book, ‘Word Problems’ which is a Poetry collection, will be released next year.
He is the second writer with Trinidadian roots to capture the coveted Giller Prize established 25 years ago. Andre Alexis, who was born in Port-of-Spain, clinched the literary award four years ago for his novel ‘Fifteen Dogs’.
Simon Fraser University lecturer David Chariandy, the product of Trinidadian immigrants, is a two-time Giller Prize nominee and sole Canadian recipient of the 2019 Windham-Campbell Prize worth nearly $219,000.
