Over forty years editing poetry at the same small Toronto press
Michael Ondaatje's Toronto Literary Life
The author of The English Patient built his literary career from a Toronto small press and a bilingual college campus — a quieter Toronto story than the Booker Prize and nine-Oscar film that made him famous.
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Michael Ondaatje was born in 1943 in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), moved to England in the 1950s, and immigrated to Canada in 1962. His Toronto literary life took root in 1970, when he became an editor at Coach House Press, the influential independent small press based in Toronto that helped define Canadian experimental poetry and fiction.
Four decades at a small press
Ondaatje served as Coach House's poetry editor for more than forty years, and with his wife, writer Linda Spalding, co-founded the Toronto-based literary journal Brick. Since 1971, he has also been a member of the English department at Glendon College, York University's bilingual liberal-arts campus in midtown Toronto — a teaching post he has held for over five decades.
The English Patient
It was from this Toronto literary base that Ondaatje wrote The English Patient (1992), which won the Booker Prize and was adapted into the 1996 film that won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He continues to live in Toronto, in the Annex neighbourhood — the same small stretch of the city as Margaret Atwood.
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