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Michael Ondaatje

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

Secular Love

Toronto: Coach House Press, 1984.

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.

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

PS8329 .M65 1995

Ondaatje, Michael . “The Vulture,” and “Angulimala.” In The Monkey King and Other Stories, edited by Griffin Ondaatje. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1995.

Anthology

Writing Life

PS8367 .A8 W75 2006

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.

Reading Writers Reading book cover

Anthology

Reading Writers Reading: Canadian Authors’ Reflections

Z1039 .A87 R43 2006

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