Contemporary World Writersis an innovative series of authoritative introductions to a range of culturally diverse contemporary writers from outside Britain and the United States or from ‘minority’ backgrounds within Britain or the United States. In addition to providing comprehensive general introductions, books in the series also argue stimulating original theses, often but not always related to contemporary debates in post-colonial studies.

The series locates individual writers within their specific cultural contexts, while recognising that such contexts are themselves invariably a complex mixture of hybridised influences. It aims to counter tendencies to appropriate the writers discussed into the canon of...

Philip Michael Ondaatje was born in 1943 in Kegalle, Ceylon, a town about fifty miles west of the capital Colombo.¹ He was the second son of Mervyn Ondaatje and Enid Doris Gratiaen, both relatively prominent members of the Burgher class, a well-to-do section of Ceylonese colonial society. The Burghers were for the most part descendants of European colonists from the sixteenth century onwards – the term ‘burgher’ derives from the Dutch word ‘burger’ meaning ‘citizen’ or ‘resident’ – and they were traditionally the most westernised ethnic grouping in colonial Ceylon. Ondaatje’s European ancestor arrived in Ceylon in the early seventeenth century as...

Although Ondaatje has won international renown as a novelist, his first four published books were volumes of poetry.The Dainty Monsters, his first book, appeared in 1967, quickly followed by the long poemsthe man with seven toes(1969) andThe Collected Works of Billy the Kid(1970). A fourth volume,Rat Jelly, was published in 1973; six years later Ondaatje made a selection of his poems which appeared under the titleThere’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do. Unlike many writers, whose careers record a sharp break between the preoccupations of their early and mature work,...

The publication of Ondaatje’s long poemThe Collected Works of Billy the Kidmarked a decisive moment in his writing career. The volume received the Governor General’s Award in 1970, bringing Ondaatje’s name to a wealth of new readers and establishing him as one of the rising stars of the new generation of Canadian writers who would come to prominence in the ensuing decade. Freely mixing the sketchily known historical facts of Billy the Kid’s life and crimes with an imaginative reconstruction of his biography and legend, the poem focuses upon Billy’s final outlaw year on the New Mexico frontier...

Although it has yet to attract the degree of critical attention paid to Ondaatje’s most recent work,Coming Through Slaughter(1976), Ondaatje’s first novel, marks a key stage in his literary development. Drawing once more upon the conflict between molecular and molar life explored inBilly the Kid, and anticipating the imaginative recreation of civic cultural history inIn the Skin of a Lion,Coming Through Slaughterrepresents Ondaatje’s most far-reaching examination of both the claims and the limits of art and the relationship between art and life. Nowhere else in Ondaatje’s oeuvre is the power of art imaginatively to...

Although Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka into a family of Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese origin, he left the island at the age of nine in the wake of his parents’ divorce and his mother’s departure for England five years earlier. After eight years in England, Ondaatje travelled onward to Canada in 1962, where he took out Canadian citizenship, eventually settled in Toronto, and gradually began to be spoken of as a ‘Canadian’ writer of considerable power and promise. Yet despite Ondaatje’s seemingly untroubled transition between these three very different cultures, his imagination remained haunted by the first country he left behind;...

Ondaatje’s second novelIn the Skin of a Lion(1987) inaugurates the mature phase of his fiction. It was also responsible in large measure for the sharp rise in his literary profile and was the first of his works to achieve a degree of commercial success. One reason for the novel’s popularity is its exploration of a theme that continues to resonate at the core of our (post) modern condition: the experience of the deracinated individual adrift in the bewildering maze of the metropolis. By focusing upon the interrelated lives and struggles of a group of Toronto workers, both immigrant...

If the success ofIn the Skin of a Lionhelped Ondaatje secure an international audience for the first time, his next bookThe English Patientpropelled him to world fame. The novel won the Booker Prize in 1992, an award Ondaatje shared with the British writer Barry Unsworth, guaranteeing him international celebrity and prestige. In the same yearThe English Patientalso received the Canadian Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award. The novel’s appeal and popularity was reinforced by the appearance, in 1996, of Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation which went on to win nine Oscars at the Academy...

Anil’s Ghost(2000), Ondaatje’s fourth novel, returns, likeRunning in the Family, to his native Sri Lanka. But although these texts share a common location, they describe two very different countries. The event that radically transfigured Ondaatje’s writing between his research trips to his former home in 1978 and 1980 and the publication of his fourth novel twenty years later was the outbreak of the Sri Lankan civil war in July 1983. The impact of the civil war upon Ondaatje’s writing is plain to see: whereRunning in the Familyoffers a measured and often playful meditation upon the emergence...

This chapter provides a brief summary of some of the main strands of Ondaatje criticism. Despite Ondaatje’s international celebrity and reputation, there are relatively few critical monographs dedicated to his work; fortunately some of those that do exist offer useful overviews of significant aspects of his writing. Three books in particular repay close attention. Douglas Barbour’s 1993 studyMichael Ondaatjeprovides a detailed examination of all of Ondaatje’s work up to and includingIn the Skin of a Lionand contains illuminating reflections upon his literary styles and influences. Sam Solecki’sRagas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatjepresents...