Ian Williams

IAN WILLIAMS, AUTHOR, WRITER, SPEAKER

Ian Williams now lives in old creekside farmhouse in Livingston Manor in the Catskills.

In August 2005 Nation Books published Ian Williams’ book Rum, the social and sociable history of the real Spirit of 76, on the forgotten role of rum in world history.

His previous book The Deserter was published 2004. His second, The UN For Beginners, was published in 1995.His first, The Alms Trade was published in 1989 and iwas republished in 2007 by Cosimo Books.

Other books he had chapters in The Iraq War, Rick Fawn and Raymond Hinnebusch (eds), 2005 “The UN and Iraq,” and The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, Cambridge University Press 2007, George Orwell into the 21st Century - 2004, Why Kosovo Matters: The Debate on the Left Revisited, 2005, Irving Howe & the critics, 2006, and a poem, the Rubayat of Alfred J Prufock MBA, in The KGB Bar Reader.

He frequently writes for academic journals on foreign affairs and the United Nations, most recently for the World Today, (Royal Institute for International Affairs) Vereinte Nationen (Berlin), and World Policy Journal (New York)

He appears often on radio and TV here and abroad trying to explain American foreign policy. In addition to writing, he has worked in various capacities for many TV and radio outlets, ABC, CBC, CNN, BBC, ITN CNBC, Fox, RTE, Arabiya and Al-Jazeera, etc. He has appeared on Good Morning America, the O’Reilly Factor, Hardball, Wolf Blitzer, Scarborough Country, Neil Cavuto, Newsnight, Panorama etc.

He now contributes several times a week to the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section and is regular columnist for George Orwell’s old newspaper, Tribune.

He has also been a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the European, The Observer, and The Independent for which he was one of the founding writers.

He was twice President and twice Vice President of the United Nations Correspondents Association. He speaks on international affairs and American foreign policy at venues across the world, such as the UN University in Tokyo, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Freedom Forum, Rutgers, Al Maty Kazakh University, Berlin Literature Festival, and Fukuoka University, Japan.

He originated the UNCA award for best UN coverage in 1995 years ago and is a judge in the New York Overseas Press Club Awards.

Born in Liverpool, he was invited to leave the ancient Prescot Grammar School when in the Sixth From but eventually graduated from Liverpool University, despite several years suspension for protests against its investments in South Africa. Consequently, he had a variegated career path, which ranged from working on the buses and railways and included a drinking competition with Chinese Premier Chou En Lai and an argument on English Literature with Chiang Ching, aka Mme Mao.
He eventually became a full time labor union official until the early eighties, when he moved into full time writing after winning a Nuffield Fellowship to study Indian unions.In 1987 he was a speech-writer for UK Labour party leader Neil Kinnock during the elections. (Joe Biden’s presidential ambitions were derailed when it was revealed that he had plagiarized a Kinnock speech). Since 1989 he has been based in New York.

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