Ian Williams' first book The Alms Trade was published in 1989 and his second, The UN For Beginners, was published in 1995.
The Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past is published by Nation Books July 2004.
Next year Nation Books will publish his book Spirit of 76: the forgotten role of Rum in World History.
In 2004, he will have chapters in George Orwell into the 21st Century - T Cushman ed, Paradigm Publishing, Why Kosovo Matters: The Debate on the Left Revisited - Danny Postel, ed. (Cybereditions, 2004) Irving Howe, Ed. John Rodden "Irving Howe's hero-worship of Trotsky: Where the NeoCons came from," and in 2005, The Iraq War Rick Fawn and Raymond Hinnebusch (eds), 2005 "The UN and Iraq." He has also contributed to several collections on international affairs.
He has written for on line media such as Salon, Alternet, Fox and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, has also been a columnist for the New York Observer and is correspondent for the Nation, Middle East International, and is regular columnist for George Orwell's old newspaper, Tribune. From 1994-1999 he was US Editor of Balkan War Report. Since 1995 he has been US contributing editor and columnist for Investor Relations magazine for which he writes a monthly column, The Speculator which takes an offbeat look at the world of business and economics.
As editor and contributor for IWPR's WarReport and Transitions he covered the political, economic, and social problems of transition countries and worked with many local contributors. Internationally, he has contributed to media across the world, from Punch to the Jordan Times to the South China Morning Post, Asia Times, and the Australian.
Before moving to New York in 1989, and since, he was a regular contributor in Britain to the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the European, The Observer, and The Independent for which he was one of the founding contributors.
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, and Rutgers, Al Maty Kazakh University, Fukuoka University Japan.
Born in Liverpool in 1949, he graduated from Liverpool University, despite several years suspension for protests against its investments in South Africa. Consequently, he had a variegated career path, which included a drinking competition with Chinese Premier Chou En Lai and an argument on English Literature with Chiang Ching, aka Mme Mao. He worked on the buses and trains, and 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 1984.
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). In 1989 he moved to New York, where he still lives.
In addition to writing, he has worked in various capacities for many TV and radio outlets, ABC, CBC, CNN, BBC, ITN CNBC etc. He has appeared on Good Morning America, the O'Reilly Factor, Hardball, Wolf Blitzer, Neil Cavuto, etc. In 1995 a CBC programme investigating CIA influence on UN contracts, for which he was associate producer, won prizes at both the New York and Columbus festivals.