Ian Williams named finalist for Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for Nonfiction
Published: October 8, 2021
Associate Professor Ian Williams of the department of English in the Faculty of Arts & Science has been named a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
Williams was recognized for his collection of essays, Disorientation: Being Black in the World, published by Penguin Random House. The U of T alumnus is one of five writers nominated for the $60,000 annual prize, including playwright and honorary degree recipient Tomson Highway.
It’s the latest in a series of honours for Williams, whose debut novel Reproduction won the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize. His poetry collection, Personals, was a finalist for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize.
In Disorientation, Williams shares his experience of being Black and his perspective on racism in Canada.
“I want to create a conversational space for us to talk about race in Canada in ways that are not punitive or didactic, but just open, transparent and sincere,” he says. “I’m not the race guru, I’m not the expert on Blackness. I just want to bring our racial experiences forward and have readers understand what we're doing to each other and what systemic things are doing to all of us.”
To achieve this, he felt nonfiction was the right choice.
“There are many ways I could talk about race. I can code it into a character, I can create hypothetical situations, create poetry. And I've done that. But just for a moment in my career, I wanted to pause with the imaginative and just deal with the real.”
