Writer and traveller, born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, N England, UK. He worked at Sotheby's as an expert on modern art for eight years until he temporarily went blind. To recuperate, he went to Africa, where he was converted to a life of nomadic asceticism, and began writing books which combine fiction, anthropology, philosophy, and travel. They include In Patagonia (1977, Hawthornden Prize), The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), On The Black Hill (1982, Whitbread), The Songlines (1987), and Utz (1988), a novella which was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
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Bruce Charles Chatwin (May 13, 1940 - January 18, 1989) was a British novelist and travel writer.
Education
Chatwin was born on May 13, 1940 in Sheffield, Yorkshire.
Art and archaeology
In 1958, Chatwin joined the London art auction house Sotheby's. Chatwin, needing little excuse, headed for the Sudan. On his return, Chatwin quickly became disenchanted with the art world, and turned his interest instead to archaeology, quitting his post at Sotheby's in June 1966.
Chatwin enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study archaeology in October of the same year.
Literary career
In 1972, Chatwin was hired by the Sunday Times Magazine as an adviser on art and architecture.
Chatwin interviewed the 93-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map of Patagonia which she had painted.
He spent six months there, a trip which resulted in the book In Patagonia (1977), which established his reputation as a travel writer. Later, however, residents in the region came forward to contradict the events depicted in Chatwin's book. It was the first, but not the last time in his career, that conversations and characters that Chatwin reported as true, were alleged to be just fiction.
Later works included a fictionalised study of the slave trade, The Viceroy of Ouidah, which he researched with extended stays in the West African state of Benin. For The Songlines, Chatwin went to Australia to develop the thesis that the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an Aboriginal man's personal story. Chatwin was working on a number of new ideas for future novels at the time of his death in 1989, including a trans-continental epic, provisionally titled "Lydia Livingstone".
Style and influence
Chatwin is admired for his spare, lapidary style and his innate story-telling abilities. Chatwin, however, was philosophical about what he saw as an unavoidable dilemma, arguing that his portrayals were not intended to be faithful representations; as Nicholas Shakespeare, his biographer, argues: 'He tells not a half truth, but a truth and a half.'
Personal life
Much to the surprise of many of his friends, Chatwin at age twenty-five married Elizabeth Chanler whom he knew at Sotheby's.
Chatwin was known as a socialite in addition to being a famous travel author. Tom Maschler, the publisher, was also a patron to Chatwin during this time, lending him his house in the area as a writing retreat.
Death at an early age
In the late 1980s, Chatwin developed AIDS. He did not respond well to AZT, and with his condition deteriorating rapidly, Chatwin and his wife went to live in the South of France at the house that belonged to the mother of his one-time lover, Jasper Conran. There, during his final months, Chatwin was nursed by both his wife and Shirley Conran.
A memorial was held in the Greek Orthodox Church in West London on the same day that a fatwa was announced on Salman Rushdie, a close friend of Chatwin's who was in attendance. Paul Theroux, Chatwin's one-time friend and fellow-writer, wrote about this event in an issue of Granta, condemning Chatwin, also, for failing to acknowledge that the disease he was dying of, was AIDS.
His ashes were scattered by a Byzantine chapel above Kardamyli in the Peloponnese near to the home of one of his many mentors, Patrick Leigh-Fermor.
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