Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in 1943. Educated in Sri Lanka and England, he immigrated to Canada in 1962. A poet and novelist, Ondaatje has become one of Canada’s foremost writers, the center of a literary circle based in Toronto. Ondaatje’s major works fuse history with a poet’s imagination. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems (1970) mixes various literary forms to evoke an outlaw of the American West. Running in the Family (1982) is a fictionalized memoir of Ondaatje’s own family. In the Skin of a Lion (1987) was inspired by the architecture of Toronto and the immigrants who helped build it. Anil’s Ghost (2000) looks at the civil war in Sri Lanka through the eyes of a young anthropologist. Ondaatje’s most praised novel, The English Patient, studies the interior lives of four characters swept up in World War II, one of whom is loosely modeled on a Hungarian explorer turned spy for the Germans.
North-African desert exploration in the 1930s. The Libyan Desert, a great sea of sand stretching from Libya to Egypt and south into Sudan, was the site of several geographical expeditions in the 1930s.
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