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Reading lists

7 travel writers you need to know

The Novels

Bruce Chatwin's acclaimed, captivating novels are published together for the first time in a beautiful paperback edition with an introduction by Hanya Yanagihara

One of the most influential writers of his generation

A story lonely and rich and human... Every time I think of the events towards the ending I get goose bumps again

Brilliant, startling, marvellous... Once picked up, the book cannot be put down

Not a word is wasted in the telling of this tale. Each sentence is fashioned, polished, and put into place with microscopic care

A writer no one who cares for literature can afford not to read

When I think of Bruce Chatwin now, I think of the ultimate storyteller. It’s the resonance of the voice and the depth of his vision that makes him one of the truly great writers of our time

Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield in 1940. He worked for Sotheby’s and the Sunday Times before announcing his departure in a telegram: ‘Gone to Patagonia for six months.’ This trip inspired the first of his books, In Patagonia, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the E.M. Forster Award and launched his writing career. Two of Chatwin’s books have been made into feature films: The Viceroy of Ouidah (retitled Cobra Verde), directed by Werner Herzog, and Andrew Grieve’s On the Black Hill. The Songlines was a Number 1 bestseller while On the Black Hill won the Whitbread First Novel Award and Utz was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize. He died in January 1989, aged forty-eight.

A collected edition of Bruce Chatwin’s acclaimed, captivating novels – On the Black Hill, Utz and The Viceroy of Ouidah – with an introduction by Hanya Yanagihara 
 
While Bruce Chatwin is best known as a master of travel literature, his three acclaimed novels must not be overlooked. Here we see a writer exploring human life, from its freedoms to its limits, in ever more exhilarating and unexpected ways. 
 
In On the Black Hill, twin brothers begin to realise that the world beyond their familiar fields is changing. In Utz, a scholar visits a communist state to meet an eccentric porcelain collector. And in The Viceroy of Ouidah, an ambitious slave trader makes a choice that could threaten his ultimate dream.

The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

Under The Sun

The definitive collection of the letters of the enigmatic writer, providing new perspectives on his extraordinary life.

It seems that Chatwin is narrating his own life, from the false starts, unsatisfying jobs, unfinished studies and unpublished writing to the precipitate moves, the eruptions of boredom and the infatuations with people, with places, with ideas. These letters burst with affectionate salutations, explosions of rage, sudden enthusiasms

This collection should be cherished not least because it is Chatwin's last

The editors brief and beautifully pointed comments in the footnotes provide some of the most enjoyable moments in this book

A masterpiece of sympathetic and diligent editing, absolutely fascinating and larded with acerbic comments from Shakespeare's joint editor, Elizabeth Chatwin

Every drop of Chatwin is worth it. The same exquisite observations found in his novels and the penetrating ideas found in his essays infuse even his most casual letters

As Under the Sun poignantly reveals, when he died Chatwin's extravagant writing gifts were gelling into a wider and deeper understanding of the human condition and the world we inhabit

Fascinating... the letters radiate kindness, generosity, insecurity and consistency

These letters burst with affectionate salutations, explosions of rage and sudden enthusiasms

The travel writer's wanderlust generated bestselling and Booker-nominated work, but his collected letters unveil the man behind the books

These letters are as close to the real McCoy as we're going to get - not least because he sloughs off the confident, self-possessed persona exhibited in his books and allows his vulnerabilities to show

Bruce Chatwin reinvented British travel writing with his first book, In Patagonia, and followed it with four other books, each unique and extraordinary. He died in 1989. 
 
Elizabeth Chatwin was born in the U.S.A. She came to London in 1961 to work at Sotheby's, where she met Bruce Chatwin. They married in 1965. She now keeps Black Welsh Mountain Sheep. 
 
Nicholas Shakespeare was born in Worcester in 1957 and grew up in the Far East and Latin America. He is the author of The Vision of the Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask awards, The High Flyer, for which he was nominated as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, The Dancer Upstairs, and most recently, Inheritance. His non-fiction includes In Tasmania, winner of the 2007 Tasmania Book Prize, and an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin.

Bruce Chatwin is one of the most significant British novelists and travel writers of our time. His books have become modern-day classics which defy categorisation, inspired by and reflecting his incredible journeys. Tragically, Chatwin's compelling narrative voice was cut off just as he had found it. 'Bruce had just begun' said his friend, Salman Rushdie, 'we saw only the first act'. 
 
But Chatwin left behind a wealth of letters and postcards that he wrote, from his first week at school until shortly before his death at the age of forty-eight. Whether typed on Sotheby's notepaper or hastily scribbled, Chatwin's correspondence reveals more about himself than he was prepared to expose in his books; his health and finances, his literary ambitions and tastes, his uneasiness about his sexual orientation; above all, his lifelong quest for where to live. Comprising material collected over two decades from hundreds of contacts across five continents, Chatwin's letters are a valuable and illuminating record of one of the greatest and most enigmatic writers of the twentieth century.

The Viceroy of Ouidah

A masterpiece which everybody should read...It deserves to become a classic

No lunacy too weird, no irony too oblique, heart too tender, mischief too black, to dodge the sharp angle of his eye.  He slips from the hilarious to the macabre, he celebrates the comedy and plumbs the tragedy of Francisco's life - and of Africa - in prose that grabs you with its precision

It is hard to know how posterity will regard this remarkable writer, but his terse, honed language was built to last

Magnificent. The beautiful, succinct prose is so incredibly visual, vibrant and visceral

Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield in 1940. After attending Marlborough School he began work as a porter at Sotheby's. Eight years later, having become one of Sotheby's youngest directors, he abandoned his job to pursue his passion for world travel. Between 1972 and 1975 he worked for the Sunday Times, before announcing his next departure in a telegram: 'Gone to Patagonia for six months.' This trip inspired the first of Chatwin's books, In Patagonia, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the E.M. Forster Award and launched his writing career. Two of his books have been made into feature films: The Viceroy of Ouidah (retitled Cobra Verde), directed by Werner Herzog, and Andrew Grieve's On the Black Hill. On publication The Songlines went straight to Number 1 in the Sunday Times bestseller list and remained in the top ten for nine months. On the Black Hill won the Whitbread First Novel Award while his novel Utz was nominated for the 1988 Booker Prize. He died in January 1989, aged forty-eight.

In 1812, Francisco Manoel da Silva, escaping a life of poverty in Brazil, sailed to the African kingdom of Dahomey, determined to make his fortune in the slave trade. Armed with nothing but an iron will, he became a man of substance in Ouidah and the founder of a remarkable dynasty. His one remaining ambition is to return to Brazil in triumph, but his friendship with the mad, mercurial king of Dahomey is fraught with danger and threatens his dream.

What Am I Doing Here?

Bruce Chatwin was, in his life as in his art, forever in search of the extraordinary, the exotic and the unexpected.

As a writer he was unclassifiably interesting: lucid, ironic, cool. He seemed to owe nothing to anybody.

Chatwin is equally fascinating on places. He goes yeti-hunting in Nepal, and magnificently evokes the Himalayas' seductive harshness. He visits Afghanistan in the steps of his own favourite writer, Robert Byron, and reveals something no current news report ever succeeds in doing why anyone should want to spend time in that beautiful, tormented land...human existence at least as Chatwin sees it is gloriously open-ended, unpredictable and exotic

One of its chief delights is that it contains so many of its author'sbest anecdotes, his choicest performances

I like the combination of its far-reaching quality and the minute precision with which his thoughts are charted

All the writing in this volume demonstrates Bruce Chatwin’s loathing of the humdrum, the dreary, the predictable. What attracted him was the unusual, the weird and wonderful… the journalist in him (strongly present) knew a good story when it heard one

As one reads it one cannot forget it was compiled by a uniquely gifted writer in the face of death, urgently pinning down experiences important to him. All that might suggest a scrapbook, but as a legendary traveller and observer of people Chatwin had more to put into his than most

In this collection of profiles, essays and travel stories, Chatwin takes us to Benin, where he is arrested as a mercenary during a coup; to Boston to meet an LSD guru who believes he is Christ; to India with Indira Ghandi when she attempted a political comeback in 1978; and to Nepal where he reminds us that 'Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot'

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE Bruce Chatwin's final, bestselling novel

Not a word is wasted in the telling of this tale. Each sentence is fashioned, polished, and put into place with microscopic care

This shiny little novel is not just about pretty porcelain figurines but about dirty great issues of life and creativity

With Chatwin, the real excitement derives from an intellectual drama, in dialogues about art as a surrogate creation, a robbery of divine power, and art collecting as idolatry...For Chatwin, ideas are the supreme fictions

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers 
 
This is Chatwin's unforgettable novel of a man in war-torn Communist Prague, driven to protect his collection of porcelain figurines at any cost. 
 
Bruce Chatwin's bestselling novel traces the fortunes of the enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz. Despite the restrictions of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Utz asserts his individuality through his devotion to his precious collection of Meissen porcelain. Although Utz is permitted to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he is not allowed to take his porcelain with him and so he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner both of the Communist state and of his collection. 
 
'Chatwin at his most erudite and evocative' New York Times 
 
'His final tour de force... a pristine miniature' Independent 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

The Songlines

'Extraordinary - a remarkable and satisfying book' Observer

That Chatwin is one of the most distinct and original writers we have is confirmed by the publication of another quite remarkable book

The songlines emerge as invisible pathways connecting up all over Australia: ancient tracks made of songs which tell of the creation of the land. The Aboriginals' religious duty is ritually to travel the land, singing the Ancestors' songs: singing the world into being afresh. The Songlines is one man's impassioned song

Chatwin is not simply describing another culture; he is also making cautious assertions about human nature. Towards the end of his life Sartre wondered why people still write novels; had he read Chatwin's he might have found new excitement in the genre

Chatwin delves into aspects of landscape that are beyond road signs and highways, and into a way of living that is entirely alien to the average European… those who are open to a bit of a wander will adore it

Bruce Chatwin provides a fascinating background to indigenous Australian life. 
 
The songlines are the invisible pathways that criss-cross Australia, tracks connecting communities and following ancient boundaries. Along these lines, Aboriginals passed the songs which revealed the creation of the land and the secrets of its past. In this magical account, Chatwin recalls his travels across the length and breadth of Australia seeking to find the truth about the songs and unravel the mysteries of their stories.

Bruce Chatwin

Elliptical and alive, this is a brilliant travel book

It is hard to pin down what makes In Patagonia so unique, but, in the end, it is Chatwin’s brilliant personality that makes it what it is… His form of travel was not about getting from A to B. It was about internal landscapes.

The chameleon traveller…who wrote books in a genre of their own, and whose life was his own subtlest creation… a complex, flamboyantly gifted and rather tragic figure

(Vintage Voyages)

Chatwin’s brilliantly unique record of his adventures in Patagonia and the fascinating people he meets along the way. 
 
 Beautifully written and full of wonderful descriptions and intriguing tales, In Patagonia is an account of Bruce Chatwin's travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and his encounters with the people whose fascinating stories delay him on the road. 
 
VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

Bruce Chatwin

Praise for In Patagonia

Elliptical and alive, this is a brilliant travel book

It is hard to pin down what makes In Patagonia so unique, but, in the end, it is Chatwin’s brilliant personality that makes it what it is… His form of travel was not about getting from A to B. It was about in ...

The chameleon traveller…who wrote books in a genre of their own, and whose life was his own subtlest creation… a complex, flamboyantly gifted and rather tragic figure

Elliptical and alive, this is a brilliant travel book

It is hard to pin down what makes In Patagonia so unique, but, in the end, it is Chatwin’s brilliant personality that makes it what it is… His form of travel was not about getting from A to B. It was about in ...

The chameleon traveller…who wrote books in a genre of their own, and whose life was his own subtlest creation… a complex, flamboyantly gifted and rather tragic figure

Elliptical and alive, this is a brilliant travel book

It is hard to pin down what makes In Patagonia so unique, but, in the end, it is Chatwin’s brilliant personality that makes it what it is… His form of travel was not about getting from A to B. It was about in ...

The chameleon traveller…who wrote books in a genre of their own, and whose life was his own subtlest creation… a complex, flamboyantly gifted and rather tragic figure

Books by Bruce Chatwin

Articles featuring Bruce Chatwin

7 travel writers you need to know

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