Author
Michael Ondaatje
Birth Date
September 12, 1943
(82 Years)
Associated Country
Canada
Michael Ondaatje is a Canadian author, poet, and editor, best known for his internationally acclaimed novel The English Patient (1992), which won the Booker Prize and was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film. Born on June 12, 1943, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Ondaatje is of mixed Tamil and Sinhalese heritage. He moved to Canada in 1962, where he became a naturalized citizen and began his literary career.
Ondaatje's writing often explores themes of identity, displacement, and memory, with a particular focus on the intersections of history and personal experience. His works blend fiction with historical events, such as in The English Patient, which delves into the experiences of soldiers during World War II, and Anil's Ghost (2000), which examines the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Other notable works include Running in the Family (1982), a memoir of his childhood in Sri Lanka, and The Cat’s Table (2011), which recalls his coming-of-age years.
While Ondaatje is often identified with his Canadian nationality, his Sri Lankan roots continue to inform his work, blending the influences of both cultures in a unique and evocative style. He is considered one of the most important contemporary writers in English literature.
Ondaatje's writing often explores themes of identity, displacement, and memory, with a particular focus on the intersections of history and personal experience. His works blend fiction with historical events, such as in The English Patient, which delves into the experiences of soldiers during World War II, and Anil's Ghost (2000), which examines the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Other notable works include Running in the Family (1982), a memoir of his childhood in Sri Lanka, and The Cat’s Table (2011), which recalls his coming-of-age years.
While Ondaatje is often identified with his Canadian nationality, his Sri Lankan roots continue to inform his work, blending the influences of both cultures in a unique and evocative style. He is considered one of the most important contemporary writers in English literature.
Books
Through poems that grow out of his profound understanding of the subtle complexities of life and relationships, of how we lose and find ourselves, Michael Ondaatje navigates his own past, beginning...
Following several of his internationally acclaimed novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes witty, sometimes moving, and always...
Warlight 2019
In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself—shadowed and luminous at once—we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War...
The Cat's Table 2012
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far from the Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of...
Anil's Ghost 2001
Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a...
Handwriting 2000
Handwriting is Michael Ondaatje's first new book of poetry since The Cinnamon Peeler. The exquisite poems collected here draw on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories to weave a rich...
The Cinnamon Peeler 1997
The Cinnamon Peeler brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won...
Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a...
Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the...
Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje's visionary novel traces the legendary outlaw's passage...
The English Patient 1993
The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper...
In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, "...