Canadian novelist, poet and essayist Michael Ondaatje will be in Montreal this weekend to receive the Blue Metropolis Grand Prize, which comes with a $10,000 scholarship. As received before him Marie-Claire Blais, Paul Auster, Carlos Fuentes, Daniel Pennac, Michel Tremblay, Nancy Huston, Margaret Atwood, Colm Toíbín and Mavis Gallant.
This prize, awarded each year by the organizers of the Blue Metropolis festival to an internationally renowned writer, aims to reward the body of work of a writer, highlighting both its breadth and its quality.
“I feel particularly honored to share this honor with Mavis Gallant”, launched in English Michael Ondaatje, happy, from Toronto, who admits to being a fervent admirer of this writer born in 1922 in Montreal.
I started out as a poet, and for me, poetry has always been there, like a sort of back-up plan. […] In every form of art, it is always another version of oneself that one invents
Born in 1943 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, into a family of Indo-Dutch origin, he emigrated to England at the age of eleven to join his divorced mother. Her 2012 novel, The other people’s table, evokes this trip by ocean liner. In 1962, he made another leap west: he landed in Montreal to study for three years at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville. ” It was very cold. A damp cold. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold,” he says today about Montreal, where he has since often returned.
Here as elsewhere, many readers have discovered the name of Michael Ondaatje with The flamed man (L’Olivier, 1993, Governor General’s Award, since known by a title closer to the English title, The English Patient). With this book, he will be the first Canadian writer, in 1992, to obtain the Booker Prize, before winning the Golden Man Booker (the Booker of the Bookers, in a way) in 2018, after being chosen among the 51 winners. The novel became a worldwide success, selling millions of copies, after being adapted for the screen by Anthony Minghella under the title The English Patientwith Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes.
In 2000, Anil’s Ghost (Boréal) told the story, violent and meditative, of a forensic doctor who is mandated by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to investigate a massacre in Sri Lanka, her native country. It won him the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Prize in Canada, as well as the Prix Médicis Etranger in France.
In 2016, a new species of spider discovered in Sri Lanka was even given its name, the Brignolia ondaatjei.
In 1976, his very first novel, Coming Through Slaughter (Buddy Bolden’s Blues, Boréal, 1987), which brought an African-American jazz trumpeter to life in New Orleans, was already something of a big swerve by a writer born in Sri Lanka, educated in London and living in Toronto. “When I lived in London, I was always in festivals and jazz clubs, relates Michael Ondaatje. It was my passion, it was a real pleasure. That’s where I learned to dance… But the great jazz musicians — I discovered that later — were in America. It had become an obsession. »
There has been a lot of talk in recent years about cultural appropriation. Does the author of fiction still have all the rights? “It is a complex question, which has not yet been resolved. As in the theater, where there are good and bad interpretations, it can be an insult as well as a tribute, ”replies Michael Ondaatje, cautious on these burning questions. But should the imagination have boundaries? “Probably not, I don’t think so. The question is above all whether it is done in a respectful manner. »
If he is best known for his work as a novelist, Michael Ondaatje sees poetry occupying an important part of his work. It has always been crucial for him, he recalls, to borrow these multiple voices. “I like writers, like John Berger or others, who don’t limit themselves to a single form, who can practice autobiography, the novel, non-fiction and poetry, continues the 79-year-old writer. . Of course, not everyone can do it, and do it all the time, but it’s an extraordinary freedom to be able to move at will from one part of the language to another. »
“I feel like I’m lucky,” he admits. I started out as a poet, and for me, poetry has always been there, like a sort of back-up plan. It is a need more than a habit. But in every form of art, it’s always another version of yourself that you invent. »
And at the author of Billy the Kid, œcomplete works (L’Olivier, 1998, Governor General’s Prize in Poetry in 1970 for the English version), in the same way that a poem can ignite from a tiny spark, a novel comes to life and spreads from of a simple image or decor. “What poetry taught me is that when you start a poem, you don’t know what’s going to happen. At the beginning, we have a word, an image, a tone. But after a few stanzas or a few pages, we are faced with a sort of landscape. Thus, at the start, he says, The English Patient was nothing but a late-night conversation between a patient and a nurse.
All that remains is to pull on the wire, with patience. The rest, all the rest, he says, is a matter of rewriting. It’s a process, he admits, that greatly influenced him when he became a novelist. Add, always by hand and from one version to another, layers of meaning. Refine the book and make it denser. No wonder that, like documentary research, rewriting is his favorite part of the creative process.
“For me, I love the art of rewriting, it’s such an important thing. It’s a bit like what a filmmaker does, who edits and edits his film until the length and the tone seem right to him. »