About the author

Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient became a movie, snaring nine Oscars. The Booker “gave me more freedom to write what I really wanted to,” he says. Born in Sri Lanka, moving to England aged 10, then to Canada in 1962, Michael, 74, says he “recreated a version of my childhood in Running in the Family and The Cat’s Table – where the boy Michael leaves Sri Lanka and goes to England by ship. Both books are fictional as much as factual… but that is how I imagined my youth.” It was “quite late in the day” after university, when he became a writer. He’s now one of the world’s finest.