The last colonial
Subtitle: curious adventures and stories from a vanishing world
By: Christopher Ondaatje ; images by Ana Maria Pacheco
Contributors: Pacheco, Ana Maria, 1943-
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780500251867
Subjects: Biographers; Travel; English Authors; Voyages and travels; Travel writers; Childhood and youth; Biography; Postcolonialism
Description: Christopher Ondaatje is a true child of the British Empire. Born in Ceylon in 1933 and brought up on a tea plantation, he was sent as a teenager to boarding school in England. But soon after Ceylon was granted its independence in 1948, his family found themselves destitute, and the young Ondaatje left school and got a job. In 1956 he made his way to Canada with just thirteen dollars in his pocket. From this improbable beginning there followed a series of commercial triumphs until 1988 when he abruptly abandoned high finance at the peak of his career and reinvented himself as an explorer and author, focusing mainly on the colonial period.It is the curious encounters behind these often precarious adventures that make up The Last Colonial.