In Patagonia

Elliptical and alive, this is a brilliant travel book * Observer *
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. * Sunday Times *
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 – Colin Thubron * Guardian *

Bruce Chatwin

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, launching 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.

Nicholas Shakespeare

Nicholas Shakespeare was born in 1957. The son of a diplomat, much of his youth was spent in Asia and South America. One of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 1993, and considered by The Wall Street Journal as “one of the best English novelists of our time,” his prize-winning books have been translated into twenty-two languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Snowleg, The Dancer Upstairs, Inheritance, Priscilla, Six Minutes in May, and acclaimed biographies of Bruce Chatwin and Ian Fleming. His most recent thriller featuring John Dyer was The Sandpit. He has been longlisted for the Booker Prize twice, was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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