Sri Lanka-born Author Gets Literary Nods

Michael Ondaatje wins Booker twice over

If there is one name in the pantheon of authors that’s more often associated than that of others, it must be Philip Michael Ondaatje. A Sri Lanka-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, editor, essayist, novelist and filmmaker, he has had a brace of his writings associated with the prestigious Booker Prize.

In 2018, he was featured for a second time on the long list of the Man Booker Prize (as it was known between 2002 and 2019) for his Warlight – a novel about espionage and intrigue, set in and after World War II.

It was 30 years before however, that saw the Renaissance man of Sri Lankan letters – albeit now, a resident of the island’s far-flung diaspora – swimming like a new planet into the ken of the Booker with his complex and layered novel The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize for Fiction (the award’s nomenclature from 1969 to 2001) in 1992.

In the relatively short span of three decades – a tad under three eighths the length of the 80-year-old writer’s lifespan to date – Michael Ondaatje went on to win an award that positioned his 1992 novel as the pièce de résistance in the Booker’s literary canon.

It was when The English Patient was crowned as “the best work of fiction from the last five decades of the Man Booker Prize” in 2018.

In a star-studded constellation of previous winners, this was stellar recognition for a man whose other works spanned the gamut from compendia such as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1981) through novels – his first being Coming Through Slaughter (1976), a fictionalised account of jazz musician Buddy Bolden – to volumes of memoirs like Running in the Family (1983), which reminisced about Sri Lanka.

It was the acme of achievement for an author who had already been the recipient of the Canadian Governor General’s Award, literary nod the Giller Prize and French encomium Prix Médicis étranger.

And last but not least, in 1996 the Booker recognised creation was made into an Academy Award-winning film by the same name.

In the relatively short span of three decades … Michael Ondaatje went on to win an award that positioned his 1992 novel as the pièce de résistance in the Booker’s literary canon