Michael ondaatje a stolen biography definition

The eyes of Michael Ondaatje, prize-winning author of The English Patient, are a baffling window on the inner man: the brilliant, pale sapphires of a witty Dutch burgher set in a 68-year-old Tamil frame. As he says of himself and his work, "I am a mongrel of place. Of race. Of cultures. Of many genres." An interview with Ondaatje is a playful compendium of anecdote, on-the-hoof cultural criticism and crafty conversational shape-shifting. "Charm" is a dangerous word, but an hour or two with Michael Ondaatje is a beguiling experience.

The more you look, the more dizzyingly kaleidoscopic he seems to become: a Canadian citizen who remains profoundly Sri Lankan. A winner of the Booker prize who first made his name as a poet. An admirer of Robert Browning and Thomas Wyatt who finds his deepest inspiration in the aesthetic traditions of the East. A writer whose 2007 title, Divisadero, encrypts a double meaning, derived from the Spanish word for "division", or from divisar, meaning "to gaze at something from a distance".

If Ondaatje, the man, is divided and detached, then Ondaatje, the writer, is militantly opposed to western habits of narrative. This is partly because he was raised in Ceylon's oral tradition: "tall stories, gossip, arguments and lies at dinner". He quotes the critic John Berger with approval: "Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one." This, he adds, "is the possibility of our age. A person grows up in Colombo or Wichita and their true mentor or touchstone could be Calvino or Miles Davis, or it could be a political gesture or act in a far away place."

Those words could almost be the epigraph to his new novel, The Cat's Table – an end-of-empire adventure story about a boy's life-changing journey from Ceylon (as it was) to England in the early 50s. This rite of passage was experienced by the 11-year-old Ondaat

Canadian novelist and poet (born 1943)

Philip Michael OndaatjeCC FRSL (; 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, publishing The Dainty Monsters, and then in 1970 the critically acclaimed The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. His novel The English Patient (1992), adapted into a film in 1996 and won the 1992 Golden Man Booker Prize.

Ondaatje has been "fostering new Canadian writing" with two decades commitment to Coach House Press (ca. 1970–1990), and his editorial credits include the journal Brick, and the Long Poem Anthology (1979), among others.

Early life and education

Ondaatje was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1943, to Major Mervyn Ondaatje and Doris Gratiaen of Tamil and Burgher descent (Dutch and Sinhalese). In 1954, he re-joined his mother in England. where he attended Dulwich College. He emigrated to Montreal, Quebec, in 1962, studying at Bishop's College School and Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, for three years. He attended the University of Toronto receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965, followed by a Master of Arts from Queen's University at Kingston.

The poet D. G. Jones noted his poetic ability.

Ondaatje began teaching English at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. In 1971, he taught English literature at Glendon College, York University.

Work

Ondaatje has published 13 books of poetry, and won the Governor General's Award for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems 1973–1978 (1979).Anil's Ghost (2000) was the winner of the 2000 Giller Prize, the Prix

1Michael Ondaatje has become a kind of cultural icon in the little world of Canadian letters. While his reputation has been largely created by his talent and success, his “back story,” if you will, has contributed a fascinating Personal mythology. He is the best of every world. An exotic Torontonian. A postmodern patriarch. A famous recluse. He has nothing on the J.D. Salingers of the world, to be sure, but he has managed to become the centre of attention while still being known as a “private writer.” And it is crafty business, an illusionist’s trick through which Ondaatje distracts his loyal reading public with red herrings so succulent that we spend so much time savouring them we lose his trail. His 1982 book, Running in the Family, is the prime example of this trick. In the afterword to the New Canadian Library edition of the book, Nicole Brossard writes that the book’s “magic... holds at an equal distance both the true and the false” (181). While in all his work on historical figures Ondaatje employs a sly mixture of documented fact, educated speculation and pure fantastical invention, and he often inserts himself into these works, only in Running in the Family does he throw traditional autobiographical cues, and by no means haphazardly, into the mix. Ondaatje can have a fascinating reputation, while at the same time maintaining his privacy because he deliberately confuses truth and fiction, and public and private spheres of knowledge. Running in the Family magnifies this technique by telling so much in its flamboyancy and autobiographical cues, but keeping so much at a distance from the reader in its fictionalization and its very deceptive “authenticity.”

2The first biography of Ondaatje to have come out-unauthorized, of course--is Ed Jewinski’s 1994 Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beautifully. Anyone who has read this book will know that from an academic point of view it

‘In Sri Lanka, a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts’ (Michael Ondaatje)