LITERATURE + LECTURES

Inprint presents the 2011/2012 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.  Monday, October 10 the series features Michael Ondaatje, in the Moores Opera House, University of Houston.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE is “one of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time” (Geoff Dyer, The Guardian). Born in Sri Lanka to Indian/Dutch ancestry and now a Canadian citizen, Ondaatje is the author of five novels, including the Booker Prize winning The English Patient. Set in an Italian villa at the end of WWII and praised by Toni Morrison as “profound, beautiful and heart-quickening,” the book was made into an Academy Award-winning film. His fourth novel, Anil’s Ghost, also became an international bestseller and won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Prix Médicis.

Celebrated for his ability to redefine structural forms and focus on characters that history neglects, the Chicago Tribune says, “Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet.” He is also the author of a memoir, Running in the Family, and several volumes of poetry, including the Governor General’s Award-winning There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning To Do and Handwriting.

Ondaatje comes to Houston to read from his much anticipated new novel, The Cat’s Table, to be released in October 2011. The novel follows an unescorted 11-year-old boy on a ship bound from Ceylon to England, through unforgettable adventures with his two new best friends who join him in spying on the adults around them. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a graceful, closely observed novel . . . beautifully detailed, without a false note . . . Elegiac, mature and nostalgic—a fine evocation of childhood, and of days irresistibly past.”

Photo credit Jeff Nolte.