Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion

About In the Skin of a Lion

Michael Ondaatje (born 1943) is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet who is one of the most celebrated literary stylists in English — a writer who came to fiction from poetry and whose prose retains a poet's attention to the image, the sentence, and the non-linear organization of experience. Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, he emigrated to England and then Canada, where he has lived since 1962. His debut novel The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) mixed prose poems, photographs, and documents; Running in the Family (1982) was a memoir-novel about his Sri Lankan family. In the Skin of a Lion (1987) — set in the building of early twentieth-century Toronto — was his breakthrough; The English Patient (1992) won the Booker Prize and the Golden Booker (the best Booker winner of 1968–2018) and was adapted by Anthony Minghella. Anil's Ghost (2000), set during the Sri Lankan civil war, won the Giller Prize; Divisadero (2007) and The Cat's Table (2011) followed. His lyrical, non-linear style — which gives more importance to individual scenes of intense beauty than to conventional narrative momentum — is one of the most distinctive voices in late-twentieth-century fiction.