Ondaatjes literary career began with his poetry in 1967, publishing The Dainty Monsters, and then in 1970 the critically acclaimed The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. After seeing the film of The English Patient, returning to the novel. Philip Michael Ondaatje CC FRSL (/ n d t i / born 12 September 1943) is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor, and filmmaker. He also describes his painstaking method of writing a novel - by longhand in notebooks. MICHAEL ONDAATJES THE ENGLISH PATIENT: REMEMBRANCE OF CULTURES PAST. Noted for his lyrical prose, Michael Ondaatje talks about his love of poetry, how the characters of Hana and Caravaggio haunted him so much from a previous novel - In the Skin of a Lion - that he brought them back to appear in The English Patient. The exhausted nurse Hana, the maimed thief Caravaggio, the bomb disposal expert Kip who are each haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless burns victim who lies in an upstairs room.Īs well as the mystery of the patient, the novel weaves two love stories - one from the past in pre-war Cairo, the other in the Italian villa. The explorers, Almasy, and the Cliftons got along very well. Hana, a nurse, tends to her sole remaining patient. Geoffrey owned a plane, which the party found especially useful in helping to map the desert.

The novel tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian villa as the Second World War ends. The final curtain is closing on the Second World War and in an abandoned Italian village.

Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje talks to James Naughtie and readers about his 1992 Booker prize-winning novel The English Patient.

The english patient by michael ondaatje