Born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Ondaatje emigrated to England in 1952 and then to Canada in 1962. A graduate of the University of Toronto (B.A., 1965) and Queen’s University (M.A.), he established a reputation first as a poet before achieving acclaim as a novelist. He is also an accomplished anthologist and editor, filmmaker, and teacher. Ondaatje became a member of the Order of Canada in 1988 and in 2003 was made Chevalier in Arts and Literature by the government of France. In August 2017 he was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada. Ondaatje lives in Toronto.
Michael Ondaatje was the 2011 recipient of the PEN Literary Service Award.
Poetry
The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992, c1989.
PS8579 .N2 C5 1992
Publisher’s Synopsis
… The Cinnamon Peeler, brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist.
Poetry
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems
Toronto: Anansi, 1970.
PS8579 .N2 C6
New York: Norton, 1974.
PS8579 .N2 C6 1974
Publisher’s Synopsis (Anansi)
In this remarkable composite of eyewitness accounts, tall tales, facts, and photographs, Michael Ondaatje conjures up Billy the Kid and the world he lived in, creating not only a powerfully moving portrait but also a more profound myth.
Awards and Honours
1970 Governor General’s Literary Award–English Prose and Poetry (Winner)
Poetry
The Dainty Monsters
Toronto: Coach House, 1967 (reprinted 1991).
PS8579 .N2 D3 1991
3rd ed. 1972; 4th ed. 1974.
Poetry
Elimination Dance
Ilderton, Ont.: Nairn Coldstream, 1978.
New. rev. ed.
Ilderton, Ont.: Brick Books, 1980.
Bilingual traveller’s ed.
London, Ont.: Brick Books, 1991.
Poetry
Handwriting
Toronto: M&S, 1998.
PS8579 .N2 H36 1998
Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2000.
Publisher’s Synopsis
[Handwriting] is a collection of exquisitely crafted poems of delicacy and power — poems about love, landscape, and the sweep of history set in the poet’s first home, Sri Lanka.
Awards and Honours
1998 Governor General’s Literary Award–English Poetry (Nominated)
1998 Alcuin Society Award for Excellence in Book Design in Canada–Poetry category (First Prize) ; Designer: Sarmila Mohammed; Kong Njo (cover)
Poetry
The Man With Seven Toes
Toronto: Coach House, 1969.
2nd ed., 1971; 3rd ed., 1975.
Poetry
Rat Jelly
Toronto: Coach House Press, 1973.
PS8579 .N2 R3
Publisher’s Synopsis
This new collection … marks yet another new direction in the solid but unpredictable methods of a writer whose talent is to push the unexpected towards the reader in poems so delicately fashioned their power source is almost invisible.
Poetry
The Story
Drawings by David Bolduc
[Toronto: World Literacy of Canada, 2004.]
Limited edition of 125 copies.
Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From House of Anansi Press website)
Like a miniature of Ondaatje’s larger themes — love, memory, family, exile — The Story unfolds into “our dismantled childhoods,” and offers us the freedom to extend its narrative into our own lives.
This beautiful, hauntingly illustrated edition of Michael Ondaatje’s poem The Story was conceived by Ondaatje and artist David Bolduc as a fundraising project for World Literacy of Canada. All royalties from the sale of this book will go directly to World Literacy to help it continue its literacy work with women and children in India.
Poetry
There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do: Poems, 1963-1978
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979.
New York: Norton, 1979.
PS8579 .N2 T4 1979
Publisher’s Synopsis (Norton)
Awards and Honours
1979 Governor General’s Literary Award–English Poetry or Drama (Winner)
Poetry
Tin Roof
Lantzville, B.C.: Island Writing Series, 1982.
Special Collections Available soon
Limited ed. of 500 copies
Poetry
A Year of Last Things
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2024.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived here since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world – describing himself as a “mongrel,” someone born out ofdiversecultures. Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Moliere’s chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the California coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. At first sight it is a glittering collection of fragments and memories – but small, intricate pieces of a life are precisely what matter most to Ondaatje. They make an emotional history. As he writes in the opening poem: “Reading the lines he loves / he slips them into a pocket, / wishes to die with his clothes / full of torn free stanzas / and the telephone numbers / of his children in far cities”. Poetry – where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame – is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.
Anthology (Poetry)
New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry
Souster, Raymond, ed.
Toronto: Contact Press, 1966.
PS8292 .S68 1966
Fiction
Anil’s Ghost
Toronto: M&S, 2000.
PS8579 .N2 A84 2000
Publisher’s Synopsis
The time is our time. The place Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern tip of India, a country formerly known as Ceylon, which is steeped in centuries of cultural achievement
and tradition — and forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a country divided against itself.
Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, … a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human-rights group to work with local officials to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island.
Awards and Honours
2000 Giller Prize (Co-winner with David Adams Richard’s Mercy Among the Children)
2000 Governor General’s Literary Award–English Fiction (Winner)
2001 Irish Times International Fiction Prize (Winner)
2000 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize–Fiction (Winner)
2000 Prix Medicis–Etranger (Winner)
Fiction
The Cat’s Table
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011.
PS8579 .N2 C38 2011
Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England. At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly “Cat’s Table” with an eccentric and unforgettable group of grownups and two other boys. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys find themselves immersed in the worlds and stories of the adults around them. At night they spy on a shackled prisoner — his crime and fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever.
Looking back from deep within adulthood, and gradually moving back and forth from the decks and holds of the ship to the years that follow the narrator unfolds a spellbinding and layered tale about the magical, often forbidden discoveries of childhood and the burdens of earned understanding, about a life-long journey that began unexpectedly with a sea voyage.
Awards and Honours
2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes–Fiction (Finalist)
2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize (Finalist)
Fiction
Coming Through Slaughter
Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1998.
Toronto: General Publishing, 1982, c1976.
PS8579 .N2 C62 1982
Publisher’s Synopsis (Vintage Canada – from its website)
At the turn of the century, the Storyville district of New Orleans had some 2000 prostitutes, 70 professional gamblers, and 30 piano players. But it had only one man who played the cornet like Buddy Bolden – he who cut hair by day at N. Joseph’s Shaving Parlor, and at night played jazz, unleashing an unforgettable wildness and passion in crowded rooms. Self-destructively
in love with two women, he embodied all the dire claims that music places on its acolytes. At the age of 31, Buddy Bolden went mad. From these sparse facts, Michael Ondaatje has created
a story as beautiful and chilling as a New Orleans funeral procession, where even the mourners dance.
Awards and Honours
1976 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award (formerly Books in Canada First Novel Award; as of 2016 called the Amazon.ca First Novel Award) (Co-Winner with Ian McLachlan, The Seventh Hexagram)
Fiction
Divisadero
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007.
PS8579 .N2 D58 2007
Publisher’s Synopsis
Northern California. A farmer and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work the land with the help of Coop, the enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence – of both hand and heart – that ‘sets fire to the rest of their lives’. …
This is a story of possession and loss, about the often discordant demands of family, love and memory. Written in the sensuous prose for which Michal Ondaatje’s fiction is celebrated, Divisadero is the work of a master story-teller.
Awards and Honours
2007 Governor General’s Literary Award–English–Fiction (Winner)
2007 Giller Prize (Shortlist)
Fiction
The English Patient: A Novel
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992.
PS8579 .N2 E55 1992
New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
PS8579 .N2 E55 1993b
Publisher’s Synopsis (Vintage Books Canada Edition 1993)
An unforgettable story of love and war, and three men and a woman — a young Canadian nurse, a Sikh bomb-disposal expert, a thief turned spy, and a man burnt beyond recognition —
who come together in the final moments of the Second World War.
Awards and Honours
1992 Man Booker Prize (Winner)
1992 Governor General’s Literary Award–English Fiction (Winner)
2018 Golden Man Booker Prize (Winner)
Fiction
In the Skin of a Lion
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.
PS8579 .N2 I6 1987
Markham, ON: Penguin Books, 1988.
PS8579 .N2 I6 1988
Publisher’s Synopsis (Penguin Books)
Reflective and tender, muscular and erotic, In the Skin of a Lion weaves real and invented histories with a moving love story. Set in the Toronto of the 20s and 30s, both the harsh world of labour and the magical theatre of the human heart are hauntingly entwined.
Awards and Honours
1987 City of Toronto Book Award (Winner)
1987 Governor General’s Literary Awards–English Fiction (Nominated)
1987 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award for Best Novel of the Year in English (Finalist)
1987 Trillium Book Award (Winner)
2002 CBC Canada Reads (Winner)
Fiction
Warlight
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2018.
PS8579 .N2 W37 2018
Publisher’s Synopsis
In a story as shadowed as memory itself, Warlight sets the careless freedom of adolescence against the turmoil of post-war England. It is 1945, and London is recovering from the years of war. Fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, unexpectedly abandoned by their parents, are left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, who seem determined to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways), Nathaniel and Rachel. But are they really what and who they claim to be?
Caught up in the escapades of youth and first love, Nathaniel ignores the uncertain signs of danger. A dozen years later, he sets out to piece together–as much through recollection and imagining as through the truths he discovers–all he didn’t know or understand in that time: a journey that will draw him into a morally ambivalent world.
Awards and Honours
2018 The Globe 100 (Globe and Mail, 1 Dec. 2018)
Anthology
The Monkey King and Other Stories
Ondaatje, Michael . “The Vulture,” and “Angulimala.” In The Monkey King and Other Stories, edited by Griffin Ondaatje. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1995.
Anthology
Writing Life
Ondaatje, Michael, and John Berger. “A Conversation.” In Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life, edited by Constance Rooke. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006. p. 50-63.
Anthology
Reading Writers Reading: Canadian Authors’ Reflections
Ondaatje, Michael. “Photograph.” In Reading Writers Reading: Canadian Authors’ Reflections. Danielle Schaub, photographer and ed. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2006, 128-129.
Non-fiction (Memoir)
Running in the Family
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982.
PS8579 .N2 Z53 1982
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993
PS8579 .N2 Z53 1993
Publisher’s Synopsis (M&S, 1993)
Michael Ondaatje left Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) at the age of eleven. Running in the Family is
the story of his return at thirty-six, as well as the story of what he found there: the carefree, doomed life his parents and grandparents had led.
An absorbing autobiographical journey of discovery to a far place in another time, Running in the Family reconstructs a familial history against the exotic background of a colonial empire in decline.
Non-fiction
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002.
TR849 .M86 O53 2002
Awards and Honours
2003 Robert Wise Award of the American Cinema Editors (Winner)
2003 Trillium Book Award (Nominated)
Films
Carry on Crime and Punishment
Clinton Special
70 min. Mongrel Films, 1974. Videocassette.
Audio Visual PN1997 .F3 T443 1974
Sons of Captain Poetry
Training Beth Harmon
Selected Criticism and Interpretation
Ariyam, Derick Kirishan. “Imagining Sri Lanka: Expatriated “Revisions” of the Nation.” Masters thesis, Rhode Island College, 2010. Accessed August 29, 2013.
Available as an open access thesis from http://digitalcommons.ric.edu/etd/35
Barbour, Douglas. Michael Ondaatje. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.
PS8579 .N2 Z58 1993
Ben Gouider Trabelsi, Hajer. “Rethinking Community in Dionne Brand’s What we all long for, Ahdaf Soueif’s The map of love, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s ghost and Joseph Boyden’s Three day road and Through black spruce.” Ph.D. diss., Université de Montréal, 2010. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access dissertation from http://hdl.handle.net/1866/7074
Bolland, John. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002.
PS8579 .N2 Z59 2002
Brittan, Alice Eva. “Writing and Portage: The Post-settlement Novel and the Movement of Things.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2002.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Brockman, Joan Marie. “Michael Ondaatje’s Moments of Fiction.” Ph.D. diss., Saint Louis University, 2002.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Brown, Andrew George. “The Eye as Author: Photographic Theory in the Works of Michael Ondaatje.” M.A. thesis, Concordia University, 1994.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Burman, Astrid Matilda Cecilia. “Selves and Others: Narrative Technique, Characterisation and Cultural Identity in A Passage to India and The English Patient.” [Masters?] thesis, University of Oslo, 2004. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access thesis from https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/123456789/25344
Campbell, Catherine. “Hearing the Silence: A Legacy of Post-modernism.” Ph.D. diss., Universite de Sherbrooke, 2003.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Carvalho, Elisabeth Corradi. “(Re)mapping the journey back to a lost father: traveling back in time and place in Michael Ondaatje`s “Running in the family”.” Masters thesis, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2007. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access thesis from http://hdl.handle.net/1843/ECAP-7A3GXD
Chakravorty, Mrinalini. “The Dead that Haunt Anil’s Ghost: Subaltern Stereotypes and Postcolonial Melancholia.” Chap. in her In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Available in e-book format; Access restricted to members of the TMU community.
Chu, Patricia P. “‘A Flame Against a Sleeping Lake of Petrol’: Form and the Sympathetic Witness in Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” In Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, edited by Rocio G. Davis and Sue-Im Lee. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005, 86-103.
PS153 .A84 L58 2005
Coleman, Daniel. “Michael Ondaatje’s Family Romance: Orientalism, Masculine Severance, and Interrelationship.” Chap. in Masculine Migrations: Reading the Postcolonial Male in ‘New Canadian’ Narratives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.
PS8191 .I5 C65 1998
Collin, Sarah Christine. “Matters of Multiculturalism: Approaching a Canadian Politics of Belonging.” M.A. thesis, University of Guelph, 1996.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Collu, Gabrielle. “Strategies of Eroticization in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures.” Ph.D. diss., Université de Montréal, 1995.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Connolly, Teresa. “Tradition and Ex-centricity in Hugh MacLennan’s “Barometer Rising” and Michael Ondaatje’s “In the Skin of a Lion”.” M.A. thesis, Universite Laval, 2003.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Cooke, John. The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996.
PS8199 .C66 1996
Criglington, Meredith Anna. “Constructions of Home: The City as a Site of Spatial History and Post-settler Identity in Four Commonwealth Novels.” Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2004.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Deshaye, Joel. “Metaphors of Identity Crisis in the Era of Celebrity in Canadian Poetry.” Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 2010.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Available as an open access dissertation from http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/thesisfile92326.pdf
See also published version of his revised dissertation:
The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013)
PS8153 .D47 2013. Chapters 7-8 are most relevant: “Celebrity, Sexuality, and the Uncanny in Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” p. 137-154, and, “”A Razor in the Body”: Ondaatje’s Rat Jelly and Secular Love,” p. 155-172.
Dobson, Kit. “Multicultural Postmodernities in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.” In Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009, 105-111.
PS8071 .D62 2009
Emmerson, Shannon. “Negotiating the Boundaries of Gender: Construction and Representation of Women in the Work of Michael Ondaatje.” M.A. thesis, Concordia University, 1998.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Evain, Christine. “Narrative Structure and Narrative Voices in The English Patient: Film and Novel-A Comparative Study.” In: Double-takes: Intersections Between Canadian Literature and Film, edited by David R. Jarraway. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2013.
PN1995.3 .D69 2013
Fenstermaker, Amy. “Bridging the Gap Between (White) Metafiction and (Black) Self-reflexivity.” Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 2008.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Available as an open access dissertation from http://hdl.handle.net/1802/6310
Fidyk, Barbara. “Rewriting Scapegoat Text: Mimetic Desire and the Dynamics of Rivalry in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and The English patient, and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang.” Ph.D. diss. University of Newcastle, 2010. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access dissertation from http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/44664
Friedman, Thomas Barry. “Reconfiguring History: Metahistorical Fiction in Canada.” Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1994.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Gamlin, Gordon S. “Michael Ondaatje’s Representation of History and the Oral Narrative.” M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1992.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Available as an open access thesis from http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/thesisfile56797.pdf
Gavali, Shankar A. “Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost: A Diasporic Translation(s).” In Literature of Diaspora: Cultural Dislocation, ed. Shaikh Samad. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2009, 170-173.
PR9485.2 .N38 2009
Goldman, Marlene. “Allegories of Ruin and Redemption: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.” In her Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.
PS8191 .A65 G64 2005
Gosselink, Karin Jean. “The Terms of Refuge: Collectivity in Contemporary Global Anglophone Fiction.” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick, 2006.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Greene, Michael D. “Moving to the Clear: A Study of the Grotesque in the Writing of Michael Ondaatje.” Ph.D. diss., Dalhousie University, 1996.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Haldar, Santwana. “Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient: A Comprehensive Study.” In Contemporary Commonwealth Literature, ed. R.K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2006.
PR9080 .C66 2006
Halpe, Aparna. “Between Myth and Meaning: The Function of Myth in Four Postcolonial Novels.” Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2010.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Available as an open access dissertation from http://hdl.handle.net/1807/26507
Hibbard, Kimberly Dungan. “Building New Myths: An Examination of Three Works by Michael Ondaatje.” M.A. thesis, Lamar University – Beaumont, 1997.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Hillger, Annick. Not Needing All the Words: Michael Ondaatje’s Literature of Silence. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.
PS8579 .N2 Z68 2006
Horta, Paulo Limos. “Ondaatje and the cosmopolitan desert explorers: landscape, space and community in The English Patient.” In Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature, ed. Chelva Kanaganayakam. Toronto: TSAR, 2005.
PS8071.4 .M68 2005
Jewinski, Ed. Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beautifully. Toronto: ECW Press, 1994.
PS8579 .N2 Z7 1994
Kandiuk, Mary. “Michael Ondaatje.” In Caribbean and South Asian Writers in Canada: A Bibliography of Their Works and of English-language Criticism. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2007, 147-192.
PS8089.5 .C37 K36 2007
Kemp, Mark Alexander Riach. “Backyards and Border Patrols: North American Nationalisms, Literature, and the Impact of Postcolonialism.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1996.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Kennedy, Matthew Ernest. “Auto-biography and the Work of Michael Ondaatje.” M.A. thesis., Dalhousie University, 2009.
Kirkpatrick, Mary Alice. “The present elsewhere : theorizing an aesthetics of displacement in contemporary African American and postcolonial literatures.” 2010. Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access dissertation from http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,3235
Kolybaba, Kathleen Rose. “Michael Ondaatje: Artist as Outlaw.” M.A. thesis, York University (Canada), 1982.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Kumarage, Erangee Kaushalya. “Re-membering the Nation: The Body as a Site of Contest in Fiction and Film on Post-independence Sri Lankan Political Conflicts.” Ph.D. diss., Lehigh University, 2004.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Kyser, Kristina. “Reading Canada Biblically: A Study of Biblical Allusion and the Construction of Nation in Contemporary Canadian Writing.” Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2004.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Lipert, Peter. “Ondaatje and Canons.” M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1998. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access thesis from http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/thesisfile20440.pdf
Lobnik, Mirja. “Nomad Memory: Inscribing Orality in Literatures of the Americas and South Asia.” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2010.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Lowry, Glen Albert. “After the End/s: CanLit and the Unravelling of Nation, “Race,” and Space in the Writing of Michael Ondaatje, Daphne Marlatt, and Roy Kiyooka.” Ph.D. diss., Simon Fraser University, 2001.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Mahlstedt, Andrew. “Recognizing the Poor: Invisibility, Immobility, and Narrative Under Globalization.” Ph.D. diss., The University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2012.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Mason, Jody Lynn. “Landed: Labour, Literature, and the Politics of Mobility in Twentieth-century Canada.” Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2007.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Mauro, Aaron. “Intertextual Bastards: Mourning Literary Nationalism in Michael Ondaatje’s “In the Skin of a Lion” and “The English Patient”.” M.A. thesis, University of Manitoba, 2007.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
McGonegal, Julie. “Imagining Justice: The Politics Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation.” Ph.D. diss., McMaster University, 2004.
E-version available from Digital Commons@McMaster
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
McKenzie, Robert Murray. “Applications of Chaos Theory to History in the Novels of Michael Ondaatje: Disorder Within Order in “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid”, “Coming Through Slaughter”, and “In the Skin of a Lion”.” M.A. thesis, Lakehead University, 2002.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
McKinnon, Ann Marie. “The Death Drive: Cronenberg, Ondaatje, Gould.” Ph.D. diss., University of Alberta, 2001.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Meagher, Stephen. “Subjects, Inscriptions, Histories: Sites of Liminality in Three Canadian Autobiographical Fictions.” Masters thesis, McGill University, 1995. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access thesis from http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/thesisfile92142.pdf
Mence, Marielle. “The Displacement of Irony in Thomas King’s “Green Grass, Running Water” and Michael Ondaatje’s “In the Skin of a Lion”.” Ph.D. diss., Universite de Sherbrooke, 2004.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Michael Ondaatje Issue. Essays on Canadian Writing. No. 53 (Summer 1994)
PS8579 .N2 Z74 1994
Mitchell, Scott. “”The Sweet Touch”: Alienation and Physical Connection in the Works of Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, and Salman Rushdie.” Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri-Columbia, 2010.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Available as open access dissertation from http://hdl.handle.net/10355/8893
Mundwiler, Leslie. Michael Ondaatje: Word, Image, Imagination. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984.
PS8579 .N2 Z78 1984
Mukherjee, Arun. “The poetry of Michael Ondaatje and Cyril Dabydeen: Two Responses to Otherness.” In Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space. Toronto: TSAR, 1994, 112-132.
PS8089.5 .M5 M85 1994
Osborne, Marilyn Huebener. “The Changing Isolation of the Outsider: A Time-based Analysis of Four Canadian Immigrant Writers .” M.A. thesis, University of Ottawa, 2013. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access thesis from http://hdl.handle.net/10393/24062
Pan, Yun-chih. “Mapping Resistance: History, Space, and Identity in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.” Masters thesis, NSYSU, 2006. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access thesis from http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0713106-163248
Parks, Vanessa. “Becoming Canadian: Narrating National Identity Through the History of Elsewhere.” M.A. thesis, University of Guelph, 2008.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Rae, Ian Thomas. “Unframing the Novel: From Ondaatje to Carson.” Ph.D. diss., The University of British Columbia, 2002.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Rauwerda, Antje Marlene. “Unsettling Whiteness: Hulme, Ondaatje, Malouf and Carey.” Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University at Kingston, 2001.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Rembold, Robert. “Does “Running in the Family” Leave “Dust Tracks on a Road”? A Traveler’s Guide to Inscribing Subjective Ethnicity.” M.A. thesis, Universite de Sherbrooke, 1999.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Roberts, Gillian. “The’Sri Lankan Poet, Domiciled in Canada’: Michael Ondaatje’s Territories, Citizenships, and Cosmopolitanisms.” Chap. in her Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011, 53-94.
PS8089.5 .I5 R62 2011
Rostan, Kimberly A. “Collective Trauma, the Body, and Literary Forms of Witnessing.” Ph.D. diss., The University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2007.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Salgado, Minoli. “Michael Ondaatje: Place as Palimpsest.” Chap. in her Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance & the Politics of Place. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Restricted access e-book collection
Saul, Joanne. “‘The Shape of an Unknown Thing’: Writing Displacement in Running in the Family.” Chap. in her Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
PS8119 .S28 2006
Schatteman, Renee Therese. “Caryl Phillips, J.M. Coetzee, and Michael Ondaatje: Writing at the Intersection of the Postmodern and the Postcolonial.” Ph.D., diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2000.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Sedlak, Dominika. “Attuning storytelling with silence: «The Silent Woman», «The English Patient», and «In the Skin of a Lion».” M.A. thesis, McGill University, 2011. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access thesis from http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/thesisfile97201.pdf
Selby, Sharon Dawn. “Myth, memory, and narrative: (re)inventing the self in Canadian fiction.” Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 2012. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access dissertation from http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6318
Sesk, David Andrew. “Poetics and the Realistic Novel: Contextual Equivalence Systems in Michael Ondaatje’s “In the Skin of a Lion”.” M.A. thesis, Acadia University, 1997.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Shearer, Karis. “The Poet-Editor and the Small Press: Micheal Onddatje and The Long Poem Anthology.” In Lecker, Robert, ed. Anthologizing Canadian Literature: Theoretical and Critical Perspectives. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015, 219-252.
PS8071.5 .A58 2015
Smyrl, Shannon Lorene. “”In all Their Diversity”: Ethnicity and the Anxiety of Nation-building in English-Canadian Literary Studies at the End of the Millennium.” Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University at Kingston, 2001.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Solecki, Sam, ed. Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje. Montréal: Véhicule
Press, 1985.
PS8579 .N2 Z87 1985
Solecki, Sam. Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.
PS8579 .N2 Z86 2003
Spinks, Lee. Michael Ondaatje. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.
PS8579 .N2 Z88 2009
Stanton, Katherine Ann. “Worldwise: Global Change and Ethical Demands in the Cosmopolitan Fictions of Kazuo Ishiguo, Jamaica Kincaid, J.M. Coetzee, and Michael Ondaatje.” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick, 2003.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Stening-Riding, Marie-Louise. “How Newness Enters the World: Hybridity in the Intercultural Novels of Bharati Mukherjee, Michael Ondaatje and Salman Rushdie”. Ph.D. diss., Dalhousie University, 2004.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Szolosi, Stephen. “Labyrinthine Passages: The Reader Through the Text.” Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2007.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Tansley, Tangea. “Writing from the Shadowlands: How Cross-cultural Literature Negotiates the Legacy of Edward Said.” Ph.D. diss., Murdoch University, 2004. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access dissertation from http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/335/
Thompson, Tracey. “The Changing Representation of Women in Michael Ondaatje’s Prose.” M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1994.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven, ed. Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje’s Writing. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005.
PS8579.N2 Z9 2005
Toutonghi, Pauls Harijs. “A World Without Maps: Post-national, English-language Literature in the Late Twentieth Century.” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2006.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Available as an open access dissertation from http://hdl.handle.net/1813/2740
Varga, Dianne. “Subjectivity, Social Relations, History: Doing Philosophy with Michael Ondaatje.” M.A. thesis, Concordia University, 1995.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Visvis, Vikki. “Beyond the “Talking Cure”: Narrative Alternatives for Telling Trauma in Canadian Fiction.” Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2004.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
von Memerty, Joan Elizabeth. Michael Onddatje: Distance, Clarity and Ghosts: An Analysis of Ondaatje’s Writing Techniques Against a Background of War and Buddhist Philosophy. Saarbrücken : VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller, 2009.
Waddington, George Roland. “”Something More Than Fantasy”: Fathering Postcolonial Identities Through Shakespeare.” Ph.D. diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 2005.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Waldman, Nell. “Michael Ondaatje and His Works.” In Canadian Writers and Their Works. Poetry Series. Vol. 8, ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David and Ellen Quigley, 359-412. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992.
PS8141 .C375 v.8
Winfield, Thomas Barry. “”The English Patient”: A Triumvirate’s Heroic Journey.” M.A. thesis, Royal Military College of Canada, 2002.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Wong, Cynthia F. “Michael Ondaatje.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson, [289]-295. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.
PS153 .A84 A825 2000
Yoo, JaeEun. “Ghost Novels: Haunting as Form in the Works of Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and J.M. Coetzee.” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick, 2009.
Available as an open access dissertation from http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.000051929
York, Lorraine M. “Michael Ondaatje and the ‘Twentieth-Century Game of Fame’.” In her Literary Celebrity in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
PS8061 .Y67 2007
York, Lorraine M. The Other Side of Dailiness: Photography in the Works of Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Laurence. Toronto: ECW Press, 1988.
PS8191 .P43 Y67 1988
Links
Publisher Brick Books
Publisher House of Anansi Press
Publisher McClelland & Stewart
Publisher Random House of Canada
Steven Barclay Agency has a page for Ondaatje
Ondaatje page from the Poetry Foundation
Michale Ondaatje on The Cat’s Table, part of CBC Radio One’s The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers, episode “Michael Ondaatje” first broadcast September 5, 2011. Also available is a bonus track with Ondaatje reading two short passages.
“Michael Ondaatje Interview” recorded at the International festival of Authors, Toronto, on The Cat’s Cradle, episode of CBC Radio One’s Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel first broadcast November 6,2011.
“Michael Ondaatje Interviews Eleanor Wachtel” recorded at the Appel Salon of the Metropolitan Toronto Library Dec. 2, 2010, episode of Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel first broadcast December 12, 2010.
Amnesty International book club discussion of Anil’s Ghost
Announcement that the Michael Ondaatje Archive has been acquired by University of Texas Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, 25 September 2017
