Ondaatje, << on DAHT chee, >> Michael (1943-…), was the first Canadian to win the Booker Prize , the United Kingdom’s best-known literary award. Ondaatje was the co-winner of the 1992 Booker Prize for The English Patient (1992). He shared the prize with the British author Barry Unsworth , who won for his novel Sacred Hunger.
Ondaatje is one of the most decorated modern Canadian writers, winning five Governor General’s Literary Awards , Canada’s highest national literary prize. He won twice for poetry, for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do (1979); and three times for fiction, for The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost (2000), and Divisadero (2007). Anil’s Ghost also won the 2000 Giller Prize , another major Canadian literary award.
The English Patient is a powerful story that explores the shattered lives of four people who come together in an Italian villa at the end of World War II (1939-1945). The film adaptation won the 1996 Academy Award for best picture, as well as eight other Academy Awards. Some of the characters from The English Patient appear in Ondaatje’s earlier novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987), which some critics consider his finest work. This novel depicts the building of Toronto from the perspective of immigrant workers. Anil’s Ghost explores the brutalities of civil war in Sri Lanka during the late 1900’s. Divisadero consists of two marginally connected stories, the first set in northern California and the second set decades earlier in France. The Cat’s Table (2011) tells the story of an 11-year-old boy sailing from Sri Lanka to England in the 1950’s. Warlight (2018) is a historical novel told through the eyes of an English boy in the years following the end of World War II in 1945. Ondaatje also wrote a fictionalized biography of the early jazz musician Buddy Bolden, called Coming Through the Slaughter (1976).
In both his fiction and poetry, Ondaatje often combines history, autobiography, and legend in unconventional ways. For example, in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, he uses time distortions and different points of view in a blend of verse and prose that reflects Ondaatje’s fascination with the violence of the American West.
Ondaatje made his literary debut as a poet with The Dainty Monsters (1967). His other poetry collections include the man with seven toes (1969), Rat Jelly (1973), Secular Love (1984), The Cinnamon Peeler (1989), and Handwriting (1998). In his poetry, he often blends wit and irony, desire and violence, loss and redemption.
Philip Michael Ondaatje was born on Sept. 12, 1943, in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In his memoir Running in the Family (1982), he weaves together scenes from his family’s history in Sri Lanka and his later life in Canada. Ondaatje left Sri Lanka at the age of 11 and moved to Canada in 1962 and later became a Canadian citizen. Ondaatje earned a B.A. degree at the University of Toronto in 1965 and an M.A. degree at Queen’s University in 1967. He taught English at York University for several years.
