Michael Ondaatje was born in 1943 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. His parents were of Tamil and Dutch Burgher descent, and in 1954, he and his mother emigrated to England. Ondaatje attended Dulwich College, a private school in London, before moving to Montreal, Quebec, in 1962. In Montreal, he studied at Bishops’ College School and Bishops’ University. He received his bachelor of arts from the University of Toronto in 1965 and his master of arts from Queen’s University at Kingston in 1967. He later taught English at both the University of Western Ontario and York University. Ondaatje lives in Toronto with his second wife, Linda Spalding, an academic and novelist. Since 1985, he and Spalding have run Brick, A Literary Journal, and Ondaatje also works as a poetry editor for Coach House Books.

Ondaatje’s first collection of poetry, The Dainty Monsters (1967), is a series of lyric poems that juxtapose everyday domestic life with grand mythic images. His second poetry collection, The Collected Works of Billy the Kidd (1970), was inspired by Ondaatje’s fascination with stories of the American West. A pastiche, it contains not only poems, but

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