Ondaatje’s early poetry, collected in the volume There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do: Poems, 1963–1978, merges the surreal and the everyday.

“He cares more about the relationship between art and nature than any other poet since the Romantics,” stated Liz Rosenberg in New York Times Book Review, “and more than most contemporary poets care about any ideas at all.” As a poet, he is deeply invested in depicting the affinity between the art of legend and the world at large. A well-regarded poet before he turned to fiction, Ondaatje’s work in both genres is sensual and rich.Ĭritics note that although Ondaatje’s poetry continually evolves as he embraces risk and formal experimentation, he work maintains focus on the myths that root deep in common cultural experience. Whether retelling an American myth in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1973), reshaping recollections of friends and family from his childhood in old Ceylon in Running in the Family (1982), or delving into the brutality of Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war in Anil’s Ghost (2000) , Ondaatje displays a keen understanding of the internal struggles of his characters, using a poetic writing style that depends upon juxtaposition, startling imagery and intense, often difficult, language. “Moving in and out of imagined landscape, portrait and documentary, anecdote or legend, Ondaatje writes for the eye and the ear simultaneously,” noted Diane Wakoski in Contemporary Poets. Ondaatje is known for work that dissolves the lines between prose and poetry, past and present, image and intellect, thought and feeling.

He has received many awards for his work, including two Governor’s General Awards and the Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient (1992). He is the author of the poetry collections The Story (2006), Handwriting (1999), The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems (1991), Secular Love (1984), There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do: Poems, 1963-1978, and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), among others.

He earned a BA from the University of Toronto and an MA from Queens University. He lived in England as a child, and when he was 18, he moved to Canada, where he now lives with his wife, the novelist Linda Spalding. Poet, novelist, and editor Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka in 1943.

The english patient author