Interview with Michael Ondaatje

Courtesy of The Guardian, here’s a wonderful new interview with Canadian novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/28/michael-ondaatje-the-divided-man

And be sure to check out Michael Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing by Milena Marinkova (co-editor, Visions of Canada: Canadian Studies in Europe; Lecturer in Contemporary, Postcolonial and Canadian Literature, University of Birmingham and University of Leeds, UK), now available from Continuum. Marinkova brilliantly elucidates the political potential of the Canadian author’s aesthetics through a study of both his literary and his cinematic works, employing the concept of the haptic to investigate the “micropolitics” of Ondaatje’s multisensory writing as a praxis that intimates how one can write and read politically with a difference.

“This extraordinary book is the study that Ondaatje’s complex writing has been waiting for, the study that it deserves.” — Dr. Gillian Roberts, Lecturer in North American Cultural Studies, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, UK

“Essential reading for Ondaatje specialists, but also all those interested in new approaches to dialogues between politics, aesthetics, historiography and fiction.” — Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Professor of the Humanities, School of English, University of Leeds, UK