{"id":8138,"date":"2025-03-11T10:23:11","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T10:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tse.spyrosntanos.com\/?post_type=person&p=8138"},"modified":"2025-06-23T16:26:27","modified_gmt":"2025-06-23T15:26:27","slug":"c-k-williams","status":"publish","type":"person","link":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/person\/c-k-williams\/","title":{"rendered":"C. K. Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was born in New Jersey, and lived latterly in Paris, Normandy and Princeton, USA. He published a dozen books in Britain with Bloodaxe, including New & Selected Poems<\/i> (1995), The Vigil<\/i> (1997), Repair<\/i> (1999) and The Singing<\/i> (2003) \u2013 all four of these were Poetry Book Society Recommendations \u2013 followed by Collected Poems<\/i> (2006), Wait<\/i> (2010) and Writers Writing Dying<\/i> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA, 2012; Bloodaxe Books, 2013), another Poetry Book Society Recommendation. All at Once: Prose Poems<\/em> (2014) and\u00a0Selected Later Poems<\/em>\u00a0(2015) were published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US. His last collection, Falling Ill<\/em>, another Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US in 2017.<\/p>\n

Flesh and Blood<\/i> won the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987, Repair<\/i> was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and The Singing<\/i> won the National Book Award for 2003. He was also honoured with the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.<\/p>\n

He published a memoir, Misgivings<\/i> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles\u2019 Women of Trachis<\/i>, Euripides\u2019 Bacchae<\/i>, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. He published two books of essays, Poetry and Consciousness<\/i> (University of Michigan Press, 1998), and In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest<\/i> (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and his book on Walt Whitman, On Whitman<\/i>, was published by Princeton University Press in 2010. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a collection of his prose poems, All At Once<\/em>, in 2014. He also published several acclaimed translations, most notably Euripides’ The Bacchae<\/em> (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1990), and two co-translations, Canvas<\/em> by Adam Zagajewski (with\u00a0Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1991) and Selected Poems<\/em> by Francis Ponge (with John Montague and Margaret Guiton, Wake Forest University Press, 1994).<\/p>\n

He taught in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, and was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.<\/p>\n

The 2012 film The Color of Time<\/i> \u2013 released in the UK in 2014 under the title\u00a0Forever Love<\/i> \u2013 presented a semi-fictional version of his life drawing on his poems, with James Franco in the role of Williams.\u00a0Author photo \u00a9 Mary Cross.<\/em><\/p>\n

This biography is taken from the Bloodaxe Books<\/a> website.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was born in New Jersey, and lived latterly in Paris, Normandy and Princeton, USA. He published a dozen books in Britain with Bloodaxe, including New & Selected Poems (1995), The Vigil (1997), Repair (1999) and The Singing (2003) \u2013 all four of these were Poetry Book Society Recommendations \u2013 followed by Collected […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10218,"parent":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-8138","person","type-person","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/8138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/person"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tseliot.com\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}