Wyoming Arts Council

On Tuesday, Mar. 4, Ondaatje will join a lunchtime conversation about his writing at the Albany County Public Library, 310 South 8th Street, from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. Attendance is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Please call 721-2580 ext. 5456 or email albypr@will.state.wy.us to reserve a place.

Other events planned for Ondaatje’s visit will include book discussions of The English Patient and a screening of the Academy Award-winning film.

Michael Ondaatje is one of the world’s foremost writers – his artistry and aesthetic have influenced an entire generation of writers and readers. “Each of [Ondaatje’s] books is filled with passages of such finesse and vividness that they become part of us,” writes The New Yorker. “He is a writer whose best paragraphs hover just over the page, then fly into the mind.”

The English Patient won the coveted Booker Prize, the British Commonwealth’s highest literary honor. The 1996 movie version, directed by Anthony Minghella and starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Ondaatje is himself an interesting intersection of cultures. Born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) of Indian/Dutch ancestry, he went to school in England—a period he relates in the memoir of his childhood, Running in the Family (1982). Later he moved to Canada, where he is now a citizen.

Although he is best known as a novelist, Ondaatje’s work also encompasses poetry and film, and reveals a passion for defying conventional form. One of his earliest books, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), interweaves prose and poetry to tell the story of the infamous outlaw. He has won acclaim for his thirteen collections of poetry, which include The Cinnamon Peeler (1991) and most recently, Handwriting (1998).

Ondaatje’s fiction often reveals a poet’s talent for observation and description. His first novel, Coming Through Slaughter (1976), introduced a distinctive non-linear storytelling style, which creates a narrative by exploring many interconnected snapshots in great detail. He develops that style further with In the Skin of a Lion (1987), the prequel to The English Patient.

For his award-winning novel Anil’s Ghost (2000), Ondaatje returns to Sri Lanka, where he “contemplates the dreadful toll that the civil war…. has taken on his native land,” according to Janet Maslin, who praises the book’s “profound sense of outrage, the shimmering intensity of its descriptive language and the mysterious beauty of its geography” (The New York Times).

Ondaatje’s most recent novel Divisadero (2007) is set in the 1970s in Northern California, near Gold Rush country. It tells the story of a makeshift family—a father, his teenage daughters, and an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them—and of a violent incident that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Pico Iyer calls Divisadero “ravishing and intricate… it’s hard, on finishing, not to turn back to the opening page and start all over” (New York Review of Books). The novel was also awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Ondaatje lives in Toronto with his wife, the novelist Linda Spaulding. They have two children.

Ondaatje’s visit is made possible by the generous support of the UW Office of the President, Albany County Public Library, the College of Arts and Sciences, UW Libraries, Academic Affairs, and the MFA Visiting Writer Series.

For more information, visit the English Department’s website at http://www.uwyo.edu/english.