The English Patient

‘Freedom. I had been teaching for many, many years up to that point. Teaching full-time, in fact, and trying to write a complicated novel, and that had become too much to manage. I thought I was going to lose it – and I had quit my job. I just needed to finish the book. It was a bet. Which could not have come off more handsomely.’

Read the full interview here.

‘That rare novel which gets under your skin and insists you return to it time and again, always yielding a new surprise or delight.’

Sam Jordison, The Guardian

‘Much has been said about the richness of Ondaatje’s writing, the sensuousness of his physical descriptions and his poet’s gift for using well-timed silences and ellipses to speak volumes. All that’s true. But the thing that impressed me most as I read the book this time around is its hard centre. It may come wrapped in musky perfume, but Ondaatje’s prose could go a few rounds with Hemingway and probably knock out Kipling, too.’

Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

‘Ondaatje is a poet with a mythic imagination and this novel unfolds in prose of such breathtaking lyric and muscular beauty that the reading of it becomes almost a physical experience.’

Publishers Weekly

‘A poet’s sensitive, deep-seeing eye, a fluid, sensuous prose and imaginative juxtapositions of characters and events distinguish Canadian author Ondaatje’s impressive novels (Coming Through Slaughter; In the Skin of a Lion; etc.). Here again he brings together disparate characters whose lives intersect at a crucial moment in history, and introduces real-life figures who add dimension and credibility to the story.’

Michael Dirda, The Globe and Mail

‘It promises serenity and order in the deliberateness of its prose, but repeatedly knocks the reader off balance, and ends by a sudden widening of its vistas into our fallen modern world. That climax is fully prepared, but strikes, just a little, a tone of political correctness.’

Anthony Minghella directed and wrote the screenplay for the award-winning adaptation of The English Patient.

The 1996 film starred Ralph Fiennes as Almásy, Juliette Binoche as Hana and Kristin Scott Thomas as Katharine, and also featured Willem Defoe and Colin Firth.

Reviewing the film for The AV Club, John Krewson said: ‘This heartbreakingly beautiful film, a brilliant adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s equally beautiful novel, is a sort of Casablanca for our time.’

The film won nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director for Minghella, and Best Supporting Actress for Binoche.

The original score and songs for The English Patient were composed by Gabriel Yared. The soundtrack won an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA Award and a Grammy Award.

Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient was the joint winner of the 1992 Booker Prize, alongside Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger.

Writing in The Times on October 14 1992, chair of the judges Victoria Glendinning explained the decision to split the prize.

‘The fact that we decided to share the prize between Barry Unsworth and Michael Ondaatje reflects the passion of feeling among the judges for both these books,’ she wrote. ‘We checked our passions, if passions can be checked, by revoting by means of proportional representation like the Eurovision Song Contest: Luxembourg nuls points. The result was equal points for Ondaatje and Unsworth. We were all I think rather glad.’

The English Patient also went on to win the Golden Man Booker in 2018, a one-off award that crowned the best work of fiction from the last five decades of prize, as chosen by five judges and then voted for by the public.