MICHAEL ONDAATJE

Best-selling Author of The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost

Michael Ondaatje’s prose is a stunning fusion of jazz rhythms, film montage technique, and profoundly beautiful language. Although he is best known as a novelist, Ondaatje’s work also encompasses memoir, poetry, and film, and reveals a passion for defying conventional form. In his transcendent novel The English Patient—later made into the Academy Award-winning film—he explores the stories of people history fails to reveal, intersecting four diverse lives at the end of World War II.

Ondaatje is himself an interesting intersection of cultures. Born in Sri Lanka, the former Ceylon, of Indian/Dutch ancestry, he went to school in England, and then moved to Canada. He is now a Canadian citizen. From the memoir of his childhood, Running in the Family, to his Governor-General’s Award-winning book of poetry, There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning To Do, to his classic novel, The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje casts a spell over his readers. And having won the British Commonwealth’s highest honor—the Booker Prize—he has taken his rightful place as a contemporary literary treasure.

He is the author of four collections of poetry including The Cinnamon Peeler and most recently, Handwriting. His works of fiction include Anil's Ghost, The English Patient, In the Skin of the Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

In 2000, Michael Ondaatje was awarded the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the Prix Medicis, the Governor General’s Award, and the Giller Prize for his novel Anil’s Ghost. Michael Ondaatje’s most recent work is The Conversations: Walter Murch & the Art of Editing Film.

“Each of [Ondaatje’s] books is filled with passages of such finesse and vividness that they become part of us. He is a writer whose best paragraphs hover just over the page, then fly into the mind.” —The New Yorker

"Writing poetry and fiction, momentarily clutching his Asian heritage then spinning it off like a jitterbug partner, Ondaatje and his imagination can leap continents in a single paragraph.” — Voice Literary Supplement “Mr. Ondaatje is one of North America’s finest novelists.” — The Wall Street Journal