Michael Ondaatje

Born Philip Michael Ondaatje in Colombo, Ceylon, on 12 September 1943, he was the son of Mervyn Ondaatje, an army major whose drinking unravelled the family, and Doris Gratiaen; his ancestry was Tamil and Burgher, a mix of Dutch, Sinhalese and more. His parents separated, and in 1954 he followed his mother to England, where he was schooled at Dulwich College. In 1962 he crossed to Canada, studied at Bishop's University in Lennoxville, took his BA at the University of Toronto in 1965 and an MA at Queen's, and began teaching English, first at the University of Western Ontario and from 1971 at Glendon College in Toronto. He came to fiction through poetry. The Dainty Monsters appeared in 1967, and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), a collage of verse, prose and invented documents, won the Governor General's Award, as did the selected poems There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do in 1979. For two decades he edited poetry for Coach House Press, nursing new Canadian writing. Coming Through Slaughter (1976) imagined the life of the New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden; Running in the Family (1982) went back to Sri Lanka after his father in a memoir full of rumour and gossip; In the Skin of a Lion (1987) gave Toronto's immigrant labourers their own story. The English Patient (1992), four strangers in a ruined Tuscan villa at the end of the Second World War, shared the Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth, became an Oscar-winning film in 1996, and in 2018 was voted the best of fifty years of Booker winners. Anil's Ghost (2000), set amid Sri Lanka's civil war, won the Giller Prize, and Divisadero (2007), The Cat's Table (2011) and Warlight (2018) followed. With his wife, the novelist Linda Spalding, he co-edits the literary journal Brick, and he lives in Toronto.

In 1954, at eleven, Ondaatje boarded a ship in Colombo and sailed for England without either parent, to rejoin his mother after the family broke apart. What he kept from the crossing was small: ping pong, and diving into the pool after spoons. Nearly sixty years later the voyage became The Cat's Table, peopled entirely by invention.