ABSTRACT
Michael Ondaatje was born in 1943 in Colombo, and moved to England at
eleven, then to Canada at nineteen. His novel The English Patient (1992)
co-won the Booker Prize and in 1996 became a Hollywood film, which
won nine Oscars. He has written ten volumes of poetry, and among his
prose works are The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Coming
Through Slaughter (1976), Running in the Family (1982), and In the
Skin of a Lion (1987). He edited The Faber Book of Contemporary
Canadian Short Stories (1990) and The Brick Reader (1991). His latest
novel, Anil’s Ghost (2000), is set amid the Sri Lankan War between the
mid-1980s and early 1990s. Anil Tissera, a Sri Lankan-born, US-based
forensic anthropologist, gathers evidence for an international human
rights body to identify an exhumed skeleton, dubbed ‘Sailor’, as a victim of
government ‘counter-terror’ – a ‘representative of all those lost voices’
amid a ‘casual sense of massacre’, where truth is ‘a flame against a sleep-
ing lake of petrol’. She works with the archaeologist Sarath; his brother
Gamini, who is a doctor at the war front; and the gem-miner and
Buddhist eye-painter Ananda, who is grieving for his wife.
