Philip Michael Ondaatje is a Canadian novelist and poet. His most famous work is The English patient, which won the Booker Prize. It was adapted as amotion picture, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Background
Ethnicity:
A descendant of the Burghers- children born in the marriages between Sri Lankans and the Dutch.
Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and in 1954 he and his family moved to England, then in 1962 Michael moved to Canada and became its citizen. He studied at Bishop's Colledge School and Bishop's University located in Lennoxville, Quebec. Because of moving to Toronto Philip Ondaatje recieved his Bachelor Degree from the University of Toronto and his Master's Degree from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.
Career
He worked as an editor at Mongrel Broadsides. His critical work on Leonard Cohen was published in 1970. Michael also has an impressive number of editorial works. Ondaatje is an editor for the literary magazine Brick, and was a long-time editor for Coach House Press.
In 1971 Ondaatje began teaching at York University.
Views
Quotations:
"The desert could not be claimed or owned - it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East ... All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape."
"He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory."