(1943- ) poet, novelist
Born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), of Dutch, English, Sinhalese, and Tamil descent, Philip Michael ondaatje is the youngest child of Mervyn ondaatje, a tea-and-rubber-plantation superintendent, and Enid Doris, who ran a dance and theater school. In 1962, ondaatje emigrated to Canada, where he studied English and history at Bishop’s University in Quebec; he has baccalaureate and master’s degrees.
Ondaatje is one of a few Canadian writers who also is published in the United States and Britain and is known internationally. His early poems appeared in New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry (1967). His poetry collection Secular Love (1984) explores the pain of the failure of his first marriage and celebrates his second.
In his first foray into fiction, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Ondaatje retells the story of the outlaw William H. Bonney through a mixture of poetry, prose, photographs, and other illustrations. In Coming through Slaughter (1976), too, he interweaves biography, history, and fiction to relate the story of jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, who went insane. In the Skin of the Lion retells the story of the building of Toronto’s Prince Edward Viaduct. In 1978, after a 24-year absence, Ondaatje returned to his homeland, now Sri Lanka. In journals, he recorded family anecdotes and stories that developed into his “fictional memoir” Running in the Family (1982), which is composed of vivid, rhapsodic reminiscences.
In many of his novels, ondaatje uses his central characters to explore a violent reality, mixing the ordinary and the fantastic to create a surreal montage, as can be seen in The English Patient (1993). Here a quartet of characters—Hana Lewis, a Canadian nurse; the “English patient,” burned beyond recognition, who is in fact a Hungarian count; thief and double agent David Caravaggio; and sapper Kip Singh, who has been sent to clear the area of enemy mines—shelter in a dilapidated Italian villa during the last days of World War II. Douglas Barbour remarks, “As the complexly ordered fragments of the novel accumulate, their pasts, their presents, and their possible futures intertwine in an intricate collage,” creating in the process, as Lorna Sage observes, “an improbable civilization of their own, a zone of fragile intimacy and understanding….”
Fascinated by history, documentation, and biography, Ondaatje reinvents history through imagination. The dominant features of his style are a dynamic beauty and a scarcely contained violence. He has won many awards, including the Governor General’s Award three times, the Booker Prize, and the Toronto Book Award.
A Work about Michael Ondaatje
Barbour, Douglas. Michael Ondaatje. Boston: Twayne, 1993.
