Born 1943 in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka ).

He moved to England at age 11 with his mother who was escaping his alcoholic father; he moved to Canada in 1962.

1965--B.A. from the University of Toronto

1967--M.A. from Queens University, Kingston, Ontario

A teacher, an editor, and a film director, Ondaatje is currently a professor in the English Department at Glendon College of York University in Toronto.

Ondaatje is a poet, novelist, dramatist, editor, critic, photographer, filmmaker best known as a disturbing but potent mixer of the narrative and the lyric, of fiction and fact

He has said that he was most interested in telling “the unspoken and unwritten stories—the ‘unhistorical’ stories.”

• The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems (1970), a pastiche of poems, prose poems, concocted interviews, reminiscences, and photos
  • Won a Canadian Governor General’s award
• There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do: Poems, 1963-1978 (1979)
  • Won Governor General’s award
• Coming Through Slaughter (1976), a fictionalized account of Buddy Bolen, a New Orleans jazz coronetist who died in 1931 after 24 wordless years in a mental hospital
• Running in the Family (1982), a memoir and family history
• In the Skin of a Lion (1987) a powerful account of the building of Toronto
• The English Patient (1992)
  • Won the Governor General’s award
  • Co-winner (with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger) of the Man Booker Prize
  • made into an Oscar-winning film by Anthony Minghella in 1996
• Anil's Ghost (2000) about the decades-old conflict in Sri Lanka

InfoMarks (About InfoMarks)

• "(Philip) Michael Ondaatje" in Contemporary Authors Online
• "Michael Ondaatje" in Contemporary Literary Criticism
• "Michael Ondaatje" in Contemporary Literary Biography