Michael Ondaatje, best known for his landmark novel, The English Patient, will speak and read from his work on Tuesday, May 3, at 7:30 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.
The talk, part of Union's Perspectives at the Nott lecture series, is free and open to the public.
The English Patient won the 1992 Booker Prize and then became an Academy Award-winning movie. The author of five novels, Ondaatje also writes memoirs, film scripts and poetry.
Born in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), he lives in Toronto and teaches at York University. Along with top Canadian writers Leonard Cohen and Margaret Atwood, he is one of the most interesting and important living contemporary writers.
He began publishing lyric poems in the late 1960's. His work quickly morphed into a unique and complex mesh of poetry and prose, historical fact, photos, interviews, and (often avant- garde, even hallucinatory) images and fiction. He has written books set in places as diverse as the 19th-century Australian Outback, Billy the Kid's American West, the turn-of-the-20th-century jazz world of New Orleans, immigrant workers' communities in Toronto ca. 1930s, World War II Europe and North Africa, contemporary rural Ontario, and contemporary Sri Lanka.
Using his own mesh of genre and approach, he has imagined the 20th century, its roots and trajectories, in a unique, multi-cultural way. He has made three films of his own and recently published a book-length interview with famed Hollywood film editor Edward Murch.
Ondaatje also will visit Prof. Ed Pavlic's seminar, “Pictures Fly Without Target”: the Prose-Poetics of Michael Ondaatje's Writing. His visit marks the third consecutive year an internationally-acclaimed author has visited with English / Africana Studies classes. Previous visitors have included Yusef Komunyakaa and Adrienne Rich.