Sir Christopher Ondaatje with Romesh Gunesekera, recounting tales from a world often perilously travelled.

Born in 1933, Sir Christopher is a true child of the British Empire. Brought up on a tea plantation in Ceylon, 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 his new autobiographical collection The Last Colonial. The stories tell of Ondaatje’s childhood days in Ceylon, his early life in Canada, his fascination with inexplicable events and local superstitions, and his sometimes hazardous adventures researching biographies of Ernest Hemingway in Africa, Leonard Woolf in Ceylon, and Sir Richard Burton in India and Africa.

At this event – chaired by writer Romesh Gunesekera – he offers his own view on a world much travelled.