Happy Birthday Michael Ondaatje!

Michael Ondaatje was born on September 12, 1943 in Sri Lanka. At the age of 11, he left home to attend boarding school in the UK, an experience retold in his book The Cat's Table. Although he was surrounded by the work of writers such as TS Eliot, Keats, and Shelley while at school, it was not until moving to Canada in 1962 that he began to compose pieces of his own, beginning with poetry and later, fiction. He has won many awards for his work, including the Canadian Governor General's Award for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems, and the Man Booker Prize for his best known work The English Patient, which was also adapted into an Oscar-winning film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK49SBXBK_U
In an interview with the Washington Post, he said about his many books:
"I should read them someday, and learn something. But I'd probably want to rewrite them."
We wish this inspiring writer a happy 70th birthday!
Borrow Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient from the ZODML Community Library.