Speaker: Ian Williams, novelist, poet, prof, English, Uof T Talk: “Disappointment”

Talks for Fall 2022: Wednesdays at 10 am (in person at Faculty Club and on ZOOM)

Registration will open a few weeks before the event.

Speaker: Ian Williams, novelist, poet, prof, English, Uof T
Talk: “Disappointment”

Introducer: Linda Hutcheon

Abstract: The greater the hope, the greater the disappointment. In this meditation, Ian Williams considers the movement from hope to disappointment and disappointment to disappointment to disappointment. Perhaps disappointment is so painful because it exists at the outer edge, the very nerve endings, of the human spirit. It painfully stretches us through time, testing our capacity to anticipate the future and contend with reality. What good can come out of it? For the past several years, Williams has been writing a novel about disappointment. It is not finished. He will say more about that.

Bio: Poet, novelist, essayist, and Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Ian Williams previously taught creative writing at UBC after earning Honours BSc, MA, and PhD degrees at the U of T.  He was also Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Writers Program. He is the author of six acclaimed books, the latest of which, Word Problems, is a poetry collection that considers the ethical and political issues of our time as math and grammar problems. His novel, Reproduction, won of the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award for the best work of global fiction. Reproduction was published in Canada, the US, and the UK, and translated into Italian. Recently he published Disorientation: Being Black in the World, a linked essay collection on race, that was shortlisted for the 2021 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/8b10UHapT3

The deadline to register is the Monday before the event at noon. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.