Philip Lee Williams was born in 1950, one of three children of Ruth Sisk Williams (1924—2008) and Marshall Woodson Williams (1922- ). He, his parents, and his older brother John Mark Williams (1948- ), moved to Madison, Georgia, in 1953, where Marshall Williams had accepted a job as a chemistry teacher at Morgan County High School. Williams also has a sister, Laura Jane Williams, born in 1959.

Williams began his creative work by composing music and writing poetry while still in his teens. He graduated from Morgan County High School in 1968 and from the University of Georgia in 1972 with a degree in journalism and minors in history and English. In 1972, he married Linda Rowley. They have two children, Brandon and Megan.

He finished more than half of his master’s degree in English at the University of Georgia before sustaining a serious back injury in 1974. After that, he spent 13 years as an award-winning journalist before becoming a science writer at UGA in 1985. As a journalist he worked for The Clayton Tribune (Clayton, Georgia), the Athens Daily News (Athens, Ga.), The Madisonian (Madison, Ga.), and The Athens Observer (Athens, Ga.)

Currently, he is assistant dean for public information in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at UGA and an adjunct professor of creative writing.

In September 2009, it was announced that Williams would be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Williams began his creative career as a poet and began publishing in small magazines while he was still an undergraduate. He has published poetry in more than 40 magazines and continues in such magazines as Poetry, Karamu, and the Kentucky Poetry Review.

Williams is also a composer and has to his credit 18 symphonies, chamber works, concerti, and much incidental and church music. Only a small amount of this has been performed in public as Williams has preferred to keep his output private.

Williams is best known for his work as a novelist. Of his 13 published books, nine are novels.

His first novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest (W.W. Norton, 1984) is the story of a retired junior college history professor who has returned to his home place on a pond in north central Georgia to spend the last year of his life. The book won the Townsend Prize for fiction in 1986 and has subsequently come out in editions from Ballantine Books, Peachtree Publishers, and the University of Georgia Press. It was also translated in to Swedish and published in a large-print format.

Williams’s second novel, All the Western Stars (Peachtree Publisher, 1988) is the story of two old men who run away from a rest home to become cowboys on a ranch in Texas. This book also came out in an edition from Ballantine and was translated into German. Richard Zanuck and David Brown optioned the book for MGM as a film project, though it was never put into production there. (MGM hired Williams to write one version of the screenplay.) Instead, the project was picked up by Rysher Entertainment, where it was greenlighted, with Jack Lemmon and James Garner to star. When Lemmon withdrew from the project, the film was shelved and has yet to be made.

Subsequent novels include:

• Slow Dance in Autumn (Peachtree Publishers, 1988)
• The Song of Daniel (Peachtree Publishers, 1989)
• Perfect Timing (Peachtree Publishers, 1991)
• Final Heat (Turtle Bay Books/Random House, 1992)
• Blue Crystal (Grove Press, 1993)
• The True and Authentic History of Jenny Dorset (Longstreet Press, 1997)
• A Distant Flame (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s, 2004)
• The Campfire Boys (Mercer University Press, 2009)

Slow Dance in Autumn was translated into Japanese, and Final Heat into German and French. Perfect Timing was optioned for film by director Ron Howard and was a Literary Guild selection. Actress Meg Ryan optioned an unpublished novel of Williams's for her Prufrock Films Production Company as well.

A Distant Flame is perhaps Williams’s most notable book to date and won the 2004 Michael Shaara Award as the best Civil War novel published in the U.S. that year. The following year, the award was won by E.L. Doctorow for The March. Williams received the award in ceremonies at The Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston in June 2005. The book remains in print in softcover under the St. Martin’s/Griffin imprint.

In addition to his work as a novelist, Philip Lee Williams has published three books of creative non-fiction:

• The Silent Stars Go By (Hill Street Press, 1998)
• A Memoir of Nature and Healing (University of Georgia Press, 1999)
• Reflections from First Light (Mercer University Press, 2005)

Williams is also a documentary film-maker whose films have won awards from the New York Film Festival, the Columbus Film Festival, and the Telly Awards. Among the documentaries he has written and co-produced are A Modern Master and An Ecologist’s Life. His work has also appeared in numerous anthologies.