UT-Austin Acquires Archives Of Michael Ondaatje, Author Of 'The English Patient'

AUSTIN, TX — The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archives of award-winning author Michael Ondaatje who wrote the novel "The English Patient," officials said Monday.

Ondaatje is widely considered to be one of the greatest English-language novelists writing today. His archive consists of more than 90 boxes of material documenting his working methods in great detail, university officials said. Among the material are research notes containing background detail on the various places that served as settings for his fiction, according to school officials.

The archives offer a portal into the author's process. He composed his novels in dozens of handwritten notebooks often resembling scrapbooks, with found images inserted among the manuscript pages, officials described. Also contained in the archives are audio recordings of Ondaatje dictating his near-illegible handwriting to a typist, and, finally, heavily annotated printed drafts, according to archivists.

The materials will provide students and scholars a glimpse of his writing process from the 1960s to the present, and the archive will serve as the primary resource for all future studies of Ondaatje’s work, officials said.

“Displaced by history, the inhabitants of Michael Ondaatje’s novels often find their most stable home in language,” said Stephen Enniss, director of the Ransom Center. “He is a master stylist in both poetry and prose, and we are honored to add his work to the Ransom Center’s collections, which include many of our finest contemporary writers.”

Born in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in 1943, Ondaatje immigrated to England in 1954 and moved to Canada when he was 18. He once described himself in this way: “I am a mongrel of place. Of race. Of cultures. Of many genres.”

In a career spanning more than half a century, Ondaatje has written fiction, poetry, short stories and a memoir. Although he launched his writing career as a poet, he is perhaps best known as the author of the 1992 novel “The English Patient,” which was made into a critically acclaimed motion picture. He followed that success with “Anil’s Ghost” (2000), “Divisadero” (2007) and “The Cat’s Table” (2011), each of which is represented in the archive with extensive manuscript drafts. Also present are drafts for each of his poetry collections including “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid” (1970), “Secular Love” (1984), “The Cinnamon Peeler” (1990) and “Handwriting” (1998).

More than documenting his early writings, the archives also contain abundant correspondence illustrating Ondaatje’s central role in the literary and cultural communities of Canada and the broader world in the last 50 years, university officials noted. Correspondence with such literary luminaries as Russell Banks, J. M. Coetzee, Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jayne Anne Phillips and James Salter are included in the archives. There is also extensive correspondence between Ondaatje and such friends and fellow authors as Margaret Atwood, John Berger, Carolyn Forché, Joan Didion, Richard Ford, Carlos Fuentes, Victoria Glendinning, Jim Harrison, Hanif Kureishi, W. S. Merwin, Alice Munro, Sharon Olds, Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth Smart and Graham Swift.

There's also correspondence and documentation related to the adaptation of his novel into the Academy Award-winning film “The English Patient,” including a rich and lengthy correspondence between Ondaatje and the film’s director and screenwriter Anthony Minghella, and letters from actors Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Among the other materials are scripts, plays, poetry manuscripts, address books, calendars, photographs, speeches, talks, audio and video recordings, rare Canadian literary journals and research materials. In short, university officials said, the archive is an essential source for scholars interested in understanding the development of the author's creative works. The archive will be available for research and teaching once processed and cataloged, officials said.

>>> Image: Notebooks containing the first draft of Michael Ondaatje's novel "The English Patient," 1988. Photos by Pete Smith via University of Texas at Austin