Canadian · b. 1943
Michael Ondaatje won the Booker Prize in 1992 for "The English Patient," a novel about four people in an Italian villa at the end of World War II—a burned pilot, a nurse, a thief, and a bomb disposal expert. The Sri Lankan-born Canadian author is also a poet, and his prose moves like poetry: image by image, fragment by fragment. "Warlight" (2018) returns to postwar England through a child's fragmented memory. Ondaatje makes narrative from what's withheld.