Michael Ondaatje

Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer

• Born: September 12, 1943
• Place of Birth: Colombo, Ceylon (now in Sri Lanka)

Arriving on the Canadian literary scene in the 1960s from Sri Lanka by way of England, Ondaatje became a major literary figure through his award-winning poetry, novels, and nonfiction. His literary influence extends to writers and readers around the world. Apart from his own creative writing, Ondaatje also worked as a professor, literary critic, editor, and patron of the arts.

Early Life

Michael Ondaatje, the youngest of four children, was born to Mervyn Ondaatje and Doris Gratiaen. Mervyn, an alcoholic, was left by Doris, who moved away with the children; the young Ondaatje was about two years old. In 1949, at the age of six, he started his schooling at St. Thomas College in Colombo. That same year, his mother moved to England, and he joined her in 1952, continuing his schooling at Dulwich College in London.

After completing his secondary education in 1962, at the age of nineteen, he emigrated to Canada to join his brother, Christopher. Ondaatje then attended Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec, from 1962 to 1964. He married Kim Ondaatje (Betty Jane Kimbark) in 1964; that same year their daughter, Quintin, was born. He transferred to the University of Toronto and graduated with a BA in English in 1965. He subsequently enrolled in the MA program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and graduated with a master’s degree in English in 1967. The couple’s son, Griffin, was born in 1967. Ondaatje later divorced Kim and married novelist Linda Spalding, with whom he coedits the literary journal Brick.

Life’s Work

While still a college student, Ondaatje was garnering attention. In 1965, he earned the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Award, he attained both the Norma Epstein Award and the E. J. Pratt Gold Medal for Poetry in 1966, and he won the University of Western Ontario’s President’s Medal in 1967 for his poem “Paris.” Also in 1967, he published his first poetry collection, The Dainty Monsters, and started teaching at Western Ontario. A prolific writer, he published two more books of poetry around this time: The Man with Seven Toes (1969) and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1970), which won the Governor-General’s Award in 1971 and the Chalmer’s Award in 1973.

In 1970, Ondaatje became an editor for Coach House Press. In 1971, he left the University of Western Ontario and joined the Department of English at Glendon College, York University. By this point, he had published the nonfiction work Leonard Cohen (1970), released the film Sons of Captain Poetry (1970), and edited The Broken Ark: A Book of Beasts (1971). He went on to make two more films in 1972: Carry on Crime and Punishment and The Clinton Special. In 1973, he published a poetry collection, Rat Jelly. His first novel, Coming Through Slaughter (1976), won the Books in Canada First Novel Award.

In his mid-thirties, Ondaatje carried on with writing poetry (Elimination Dance, 1978) and with editing (Personal Fictions: Stories by Munro, Wiebe, Thomas, and Blaise, 1977, and The Long Poem Anthology, 1979). He even edited his own poems and added new poems to There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do (1979), which resulted in another Governor-General’s Award (1980) and also the Canadian Authors Association Award. Ondaatje also won the Du Maurier Award for Poetry and the Canada-Australia Literary Prize.

In 1981, Ondaatje became a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii, where he met Linda Spalding and subsequently separated from Kim Ondaatje. He published two books in 1982: Running in the Family (an autobiography) and Tin Roof (poetry). That same year he won first prize in the short-story category for “The Passions of Lalla” at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio’s Annual Literary Competition. He published a collection of poems, Secular Love, in 1984. From 1985, he also served as a contributing editor of Brick: A Journal of Reviews.

In terms of international recognition, Ondaatje arrived at the pinnacle of his writing career while he was in his forties. His novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987) received the City of Toronto Book Award, the Toronto Arts Award, the Trillium Book Award, the Wang International Festival Prize, and an award for best paperback in English. He then edited The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems (1989), From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories (1990), and The Brick Reader (1991; coedited with Spalding). In 1988, he received the prestigious Order of Canada. In 1990, Ondaatje was a visiting professor at Brown University in Rhode Island.

In 1992 he published his best-known work, The English Patient , which won the Booker Prize, the Governor-General’s Award, and the Trillium Award. Four years later, the novel was made into an acclaimed film of the same name (screenplay and direction by Anthony Minghella). The film won nine Academy Awards, including best picture and best director; three Golden Globe Awards, including best picture and best director; and five British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards, including best film.

In his fifties, Ondaatje continued his editing work with An H in the Heart: A Reader (1994; coedited with George Bowering), Lost Classics (2000; coedited with Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding, and Linda Spalding), and a work by Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories (2002). He returned to writing poetry after about a decade of publishing prose with The Great Tree (1997) and Handwriting (1998). In 2000 he became a founding trustee of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize. Also in 2000 he published a novel, Anil’s Ghost , which won the Governor-General’s Award, the Giller Prize, the Prix Médicis, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 2002 he published The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. He met Walter Murch through the making of the film The English Patient. Murch won an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for his editing of that film. The Conversations won the American Cinema Editors’ Robert Wise Award and the Kraszna-Krauz Book Award (for best book on the moving image). In the first decade of the twenty-first century he published yet another poetry collection, The Story (2005), as well as the novel Divisadero (2007), which was nominated for the Giller Prize. He published The Cat's Table, a novel, in 2011.

In 2015, Michael Ondaatje was one of several writers who withdrew from the yearly PEN American Center awards gala when the organization announced its intention to present its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, citing problems with the magazine's scathing portrayal of Muslims and "the disenfranchised generally."

In 2016, Ondaatje's position as Officer of the Order of Canada was upgraded to companion. The same year, he had a new species of spider found in Sri Lanka named after him.

His next novel, Warlight, was published in 2018. The coming-of-age novel set at the end of World War II shortly became a New York Times bestseller and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The same year, the Booker Prize established a special award in honor of the organization's fiftieth anniversary; all previous Booker Prize winners were eligible for the Golden Man Booker Prize. Ondaatje won the special award for his 1992 novel The English Patient, beating a shortlist that consisted of In a Free State (1971) by V. S. Naipaul, Moon Tiger (1987) by Penelope Lively, Wolf Hall (2009) by Hilary Mantel, and Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) by George Saunders. In 2024, Ondaatje returned to poetry with the release of his twelfth collection A Year of Lost Things: Poems, published by Knopf.

Significance

Ondaatje’s work is not tied to a particular time or place, and it evokes the imagination of a writer who inhabits the borderlands. Consequently, his work reaches a wide and varied readership. He has been lauded as a postcolonial and postmodern writer who pays great attention to his craft, to his characters, and to their contexts. His nonlinear writing style transcends national and cultural borders. As a result, he has been criticized for not consistently writing from a specific regional (Sri Lankan-Canadian) or ethnic (Burgher) point of view. His work not only challenges the boundaries between poetry and prose, fact and fiction, and words and pictures, but also investigates the identity politics surrounding multiculturalism, history, memory, geography, and myth making.

Ondaatje’s emergence first as a poet and then as a novelist in Canada occurred at a time when Canadian literature was not yet fully recognized. He soon became a part of a growing and increasingly accomplished cohort of Canadian writers who have since won international recognition. From the point of view of world literary history, Ondaatje is also considered part of another growing and increasingly popular group of writers generally referred to as “immigrant writers” a term that Ondaatje would not apply to himself. He is a world citizen who writes from an international context rather than solely out of his own immigrant experience.

Bibliography

Alghamdi, Alaa. "Navigating Transition: Freedom, Limitation and the Post-Colonial Persona in Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table." Transnational Literature 5.1 (2012): 1–9. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Arsenault, Kerri. "On Memoir: Ondaatje, Smith, and Sante." Literary Hub. Grove Atlantic, 8 May 2015. Web. 18 Sept. 2015.

Brady, Judith. “Michael Ondaatje: An Annotated Bibliography.” The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors. Vol. 6. Ed. Robert Lecker and Jack David. Toronto: ECW, 1985. Print.

Italie, Hillel. "Michael Ondaatje Withdraws from Gala to Protest Honour for Charlie Hebdo." Star [Toronto], 26 Apr. 2015, www.thestar.com/entertainment/michael-ondaatje-withdraws-from-gala-to-protest-honour-for-charlie-hebdo/article‗05d3ddaf-6edc-56cf-bad8-b173a52e17ed.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Jewinski, Ed. Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beautifully. Toronto: ECW, 1994. Print.

Maiorani, Arianna. “Michael Ondaatje.” Multicultural Writers Since 1945: An A–Z Guide. Edited by Alba Amoia and Bettina L. Knapp. Westport: Greenwood, 2004. Print.

Marais, Mike. "Violence, Postcolonial Fiction, and the Limits of Sympathy." Studies in the Novel 43.1 (2011): 94–114. Print.

Ondaatje, Michael. "I Came from a Tussle with the Sea: J. P. O'Malley Interviews Michael Ondaatje." Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature & Fine Arts 24.2 (2012): 169–74. Print.

Reeves, Peter. The Encyclopedia of the Sri Lankan Diaspora. Singapore: Didier, 2014. Print.

Spinks, Lee. Michael Ondaatje. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. Print.

Stanton, Katherine. Cosmopolitan Fictions: Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Sutter, Herman. "A Year of Lost Things: Poems." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2024, www.libraryjournal.com/review/a-year-of-last-things-poems-1803951. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Wong, Cynthia F. “Michael Ondaatje.” Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport: Greenwood, 2000. Print.