Michael Ondaatje

Philip Michael Ondaatje (; born 12 September 1943) is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer and essayist.

Ondaatje's literary career began with his poetry: in 1967 he published The Dainty Monsters, and in 1970 the critically acclaimed The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. His novel The English Patient (1992), adapted as a film in 1996,

Ondaatje has been "fostering new Canadian writing" with two decades' commitment to Coach House Press (ca. 1970–1990), where he edited, among other authors, Daphne Marrlatt's early poems. His editorial credits include the journal Brick, and the Long Poem Anthology (1979), among others. His parents later separated. In 1954, he re-joined his mother in England. and studied at Bishop's College School and Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, for three years. Anil's Ghost (2000) was the winner of the 2000 Giller Prize, the Prix Médicis, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the 2001 Irish Times International Fiction Prize and Canada's Governor General's Award.

The English Patient (1992) won the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize, and the Governor General's Award. It was adapted as a motion picture, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and multiple other awards.

In the Skin of a Lion (1987), a novel about early immigrants in Toronto, was the winner of the 1988 City of Toronto Book Award, finalist for the 1987 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award for best novel of the year in English, and winner of the first Canada Reads competition in 2002. Coming Through Slaughter (1976), is a novel set in New Orleans, Louisiana, circa 1900, loosely based on the lives of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and photographer E. J. Bellocq. It was the winner of the 1976 Books in Canada First Novel Award. Running in the Family (1982) is a childhood memoir.

Ondaatje's novel Divisadero won the 2007 Governor General's Award. In 2011 Ondaatje worked with Daniel Brooks to create a play based on this novel.

In 2018, his novel Warlight was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Adaptations

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter and Divisadero have been adapted for the stage and produced in theatrical productions across North America and Europe. In addition to The English Patient adaptation, Ondaatje's films include a documentary on poet B.P. Nichol, Sons of Captain Poetry, and The Clinton Special: A Film About The Farm Show, which chronicles a collaborative theatre experience led in 1971 by Paul Thompson of Theatre Passe Muraille.

In 2002, Ondaatje published a non-fiction book, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, which won special recognition at the 2003 American Cinema Editors Awards, as well as a Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for best book of the year on the moving image. and two years later a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2005, he received Sri Lanka Rathna, the highest honour given by the Government of Sri Lanka for foreign nationals.

In 2008, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2012.

In 2016, a new species of spider, Brignolia ondaatjei, discovered in Sri Lanka, was named after him.

Public stand

In April 2015, Ondaatje was one of several members of PEN American Center who withdrew as literary host when the organization gave its annual Freedom of Expression Courage award to Charlie Hebdo. The award came in the wake of the shooting attack on the magazine's Paris offices in January 2015. Ondaatje, along with 60 other writers, signed a letter to PEN expressing concern that the award valorized "selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world."

Personal life

Since the 1960s, Ondaatje has been a poetry editor for Toronto's Coach House Books. Ondaatje and his wife, Linda Spalding, a novelist and academic, co-edit Brick, A Literary Journal, with Michael Redhill, Michael Helm, and Esta Spalding. Ondaatje served as a founding member of the board of trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry from 2000 to 2018. He established the Gratiaen Trust in Sri Lanka that annually awards the Gratiaen Prize.

Ondaatje has two children with his first wife, Canadian artist Kim Ondaatje. His brother Sir Christopher Ondaatje was a philanthropist, businessman and author. Ondaatje's nephew David Ondaatje is a film director and screenwriter, who made the 2009 film The Lodger.

Books

Novels

1976: Coming Through Slaughter (also see "Other" section, 1980, below), Toronto: Anansi, ; New York: W. W. Norton, 1977 1987: In the Skin of a Lion, New York: Knopf, 1969: The Man with Seven Toes, Toronto: Coach House Press 1986: All along the Mazinaw: Two Poems (broadside), Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Woodland Pattern 2004: Vintage Ondaatje,