Pip Williams (author)

Pip Williams (born 1969) is an Australian author and social researcher, best known for her debut novel The Dictionary of Lost Words, published in 2020. Her second novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho, was published in 2023.

Early life and education
Pip Williams was born in London, England, in 1969. Her Brazilian mother worked part-time as a hairdresser and her Welsh father was a computer analyst, who also wrote children's books and jokes, and was a feminist. Pip moved with her parents and younger sister to Sydney, New South Wales, in 1972.

She attended Mackellar Girls' High School and grew up on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. When she was 15, a poem she had written was published in Dolly magazine. She loved reading, and her favourite book was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but she read slowly, and learnt at the age of 17 that she was dyslexic. At 18, she wanted to be a fashion designer.

After graduating from secondary school, Williams took a gap year in Europe, returning in 1988. She studied science, psychology, and sociology at the Mitchell College of Advanced Education in Bathurst (now Charles Sturt University).

She was interested in social justice, and wanted to improve equality for people living with a disability and for women, especially older women. She later earned a PhD in public health at the University of Adelaide.

Career
Williams worked as a social researcher at the Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, where her manager was economist Barbara Pocock, later senator for the Australian Greens. During this time she co-authored Time Bomb: Work, Rest and Play in Australia Today (NewSouth Press, 2012), with Barbara Pocock and Natalie Skinner. She did some radio production for produced for Radio Northern Beaches, and started publishing creative non-fiction in and The Australian and InDaily, after moving to Adelaide in 2003.

After six-month sojourn in Italy, where the family moved in search of "the good life" in the 2010s, working on organic farms, Williams worked as a community planner at Adelaide City Council. While there she managed to instigate the creation of the Adelaide City Library.

In 2017, after an "excruciating" time spent writing it, she published One Italian Summer, an autobiographical account of her family's time spent in Italy.

Williams wrote much of her first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, in the State Library of South Australia, which has a full set of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was published in March 2020, and was sixth on the list of Australian fiction bestsellers in the year of publication. It was well-reviewed, sold well, and won several awards, including General Fiction Book of the Year in the Australian Book Industry Awards and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction A stage adaptation followed, and a TV series is being made of the novel.

Williams' second novel is The Bookbinder of Jericho, which she started writing before Dictionary was published. Also set in Oxford, during the First World War, the story centres on two sisters who work at a book bindery. Several characters from The Dictionary of Lost Words also appear in The Bookbinder of Jericho, and is described as a companion to the first novel. In May 2024 The Bookbinder of Jericho was awarded General Fiction Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards.

Both of Williams' novels were based on very thorough research, and full of minute details. She says that she could not have written the novels without having had experience as a researcher. She visited Oxford three times to garner the background needed for her novels.

Personal life
Williams met her partner, Shannon, when she was 19, and they have two sons. They moved from Sydney to a hobby farm in the Adelaide Hills in 2003, but found after some years (while Williams was working in the city) that they were "hopeless at it". They then took the boys out of school and went Italy for six months to work as WWOOFers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), working in Tuscany, Calabria, and Piedmont.

As of 2024 Williams lives in the Adelaide Hills, and often writes in the cafes in Hills towns.

She describes herself as an introvert, who never likes being the centre of attention. She has dyslexia and dysgraphia.