Leonard Woolf was born in London in 1880 and spent five years at Trinity College, Cambridge where he began lasting friendships with men such as Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. In 1904 Woolf applied to join the home civil service but failed the exam. Instead, he was sent to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a cadet in the Ceylon civil service, joining the small group of white administrators who ruled the colony. He remained there for nearly seven years. In Woolf in Ceylon Christopher Ondaatje, who was himself born and brought up on the island, follows in the footsteps of Woolf.