FIU to honor author of ‘The English Patient’ March 26

Michael Ondaatje
Photo courtesy of o.canada.com

FIU will honor Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient (1992), at this year’s Lawrence A. Sanders Award in Fiction.

The event will take place March 26 at 8 p.m. in the Wolfe University Center at Biscayne Bay Campus. The event is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. To secure tickets, click here.

“Michael Ondaatje’s body of work is acclaimed by critics and has also achieved a wide popular following,” said Les Standiford, director of the FIU Creative Writing Program. “His novel, The English Patient, won the Booker Prize, and the film adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Picture, thus moving an already acclaimed and widely read novel into the literary stratosphere. I teach his semi-fictional memoir, Running in the Family, to the delight of students in my graduate class in creative non-fiction.”

Michael Ondaatje is a novelist, poet and documentary filmmaker. His other works include The Cat’s Table, Divisadero, Anil’s Ghost, In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. His collections of poetry include Secular Love, The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. He has made two documentary films: Songs of Captain Poetry and The Clinton Special.

Hosted by the Creative Writing Program and Department of English, the Lawrence A. Sanders Award in Fiction is awarded annually to a writer of fiction, identified by the Creative Writing Program, whose work combines literary excellence with popular appeal. The award is supported by a grant from the Lawrence A. Sanders Foundation of Boca Raton. Previous award recipients include Scott Turow, Pat Conroy, Isabel Allende, Richard Ford and Amy Tan.