Poets & Writers Theater

In this event for Vancouver Writers Fest’s Incite reading series, Booker Prize–winning author Michael Ondaatje reads from his new poetry collection, A Year of Last Things (Knopf, 2024), and discusses why he returned to poetry after twenty years of writing novels in a conversation with Jenny Penberthy. “The voice was the most important thing to find, that I could speak almost casually in a poem, whereas a novel is more formal and planned.”

“The lyric is a kind of small gift, and the fiction is more like putting on a theatrical production.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Michael Ondaatje speaks about the differences in writing a poem versus a novel, his mentors, and what he discovers through the research that goes into his novels. Ondaatje recently won the Golden Man Booker Prize for The English Patient, and his novel Warlight (Jonathan Cape, 2018) is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.