Ian Colford’s stories, reviews, and commentary have appeared in Canadian literary publications and online in journals and book blogs. From 1995 to 1998 he was editor of the literary journal Pottersfield Portfolio. He has served on the Steering Committee of One Book Nova Scotia, the board of directors of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, and the board of the Atlantic Book Awards Society. He has completed residencies at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers and Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. He is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers Summer Workshop where he studied under Isabel Huggan, Alistair MacLeod, and Wayson Choy.

Evidence, a collection of short fiction, was published in 2008 by Porcupine’s Quill and won the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award; Evidence was also shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the ReLit Award. A novel, The Crimes of Hector Tomás, followed in 2012. Published by Freehand Books, it won Trade Book of the Year at the 2013 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. Perfect World was published by Freehand in 2016 and shortlisted in the book design category at the 2017 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. In September, 2019, a collection of short fiction, A Dark House, was published under the Vagrant Press imprint of Nimbus Publishing. A Dark House was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Prize in Short Fiction at the Atlantic Book Awards and awarded Bronze in the 2020 Best Short Fiction category by the Miramichi Reader. In 2021 A Dark House was shortlisted for a 2020 Relit Award.

A new collection of short fiction, Witness, is scheduled to be published in spring 2023 by Porcupine's Quill.

In 2022 his novel, The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard, won the Guernica Prize and will be published by Guernica Editions in 2023.