Winner of two Governor General's awards for poetry, Michael Ondaatje is one of the most brilliant and acclaimed of that impressive group of Canadian poets who first published in the 1960s, a group that includes Margaret Atwood, Gwen MacEwen, and B. P....

Once a highly regarded denizen of a burgeoning Canadian literary scene in the early 1970s, Michael Ondaatje (born 1943) has since gone on to achieve international renown for his poetry and fiction. His 1992 novel, The English Patient, was made into a...

Elizabeth Hay, a former radio journalist who long hoped to write a novel about her "golden summer" working in northern Canada in the 1970s, won the lucrative Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novel "Late Nights on Air.""I am very thrilled and very lucky — so...

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for fiction Wednesday, beating such celebrated nominees as Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan.The $120,000 prize is awarded every two years for a body of fiction.Achebe, 76, is best known for his first...

The Louvre is inviting slam poets into its gilded galleries to rap about paintings. If that seems unusual, it is. With Toni Morrison as guest curator this month, the museum is dreaming up new ways to look at art. ...

I recently led a discussion on sparking creativity in writing, as part of an advanced writing workshop for members of a public relations association. This got me thinking about being a writer -- I’ve always identified myself as an artist, not a writer, yet I...

In the following essay, Barbour traces Ondaatje's poetic development from his first collection through There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do. Barbour discovers a trend in Ondaatje's writing toward more experimental and personal poetry.

In the essay below, Owens presents a thorough analysis of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, focusing in particular on the tension between order and disorder in the collection. Owens asserts that Billy “seeks or imposes order in the external world to compensate for a disintegrating inner world.”

In the following essay, Matthews connects the autobiographical elements of Running in the Family with conventional dramatic techniques in order to demonstrate the work's ritualized “performance” of personal, familial, and community identity.