Michael Ondaatje is the author of seven novels; a memoir, Running in the Family; a non-fiction book on film, The Conversations- Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film; and several books of poetry, including The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. The English Patient received the Booker Prize in 1992 and the Golden Man Booker in 2018, and was made into a film directed by Anthony Minghella. Anil's Ghost was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize and the Prix Medicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.
Brightly coloured, sweet and painful, bloody-minded and otherworldly, [this book] achieves the status of legend -- Margaret Atwood Eloquent, oblique, witty, full of light and feeling....Ondaatje's knowledge of the fragility and luck of life is very clear. So, too, is the grace and originality of his prose * New Yorker * Ondaatje has produced a remarkable book....Shimmering through the haze of heat and memory is an impressionistic, sometimes surreal portrait of an exotic time and place now gone, a colonial paradise that had its own rhythms and imperatives * Globe and Mail * A beautiful, luscious book. Michael Ondaatje has depicted his extraordinary family, who delighted in masks and costumes and love affairs that 'rainbowed over marriages' in the kind of language that makes glory of their lives. He has gone on a poet's journey to Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and the reader who travels with him enters a truly magical world -- Maxine Hong Kingston With a prose style equal to the voluptuousness of [Ondaatje's] subject and a sense of humor never too far away, Running in the Family is sheer reading pleasure * Washington Post *