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1940-1989
Traveller, journalist and author. Charles Bruce Chatwin was born on 13 May 1940 at Dronfield, near Sheffield, Yorkshire. His parents lived in the West Midlands, but his mother had temporarily moved back to her family in Yorkshire while his father was serving in the Royal Navy. Bruce grew up West Heath, then a Warwickshire town but subsequently absorbed into Birmingham, where his father was a solicitor. After attending Marlborough College, Wiltshire, Bruce went to work for the auction house, Sotherby's, where he soon proved his talent for assessing fine art. In 1965 he was appointed director of the Impressionist Art Department but due to problems with his eyesight and an urge to travel he resigned his post the following year.
He studied archaeology for two years at Edinburgh University but left to continue his travels, becoming a travel correspondent for the Sunday Times before completing his first published book, In Patagonia (1977), about his experiences in Argentina and Chile. This was very well received and won several awards including the Hawthornden Prize and the Somerset Maughan Award.
Unlike his other work, On the Black Hill (1982) is quite a claustrophobic novel, set as it is on a Welsh border farm in Herefordshire (Black Hill is a real name). It centres on the mundane lives of two brothers, Benjamin and Lewis. Lewis yearns to move away and discover worldly delights whereas his brother is content to stay put. The novelist, Susan Hill, who knew Bruce Chatwin, rates On the Black Hill as a mighty novel. "There is no book quite like it, though it owes something to Francis Kilvert, another walker among the Black Hills, another rather isolated, and ultimately sad figure." [From her weblog, September 2006]. The book was chosen as the best first novel in the Whitbread Book Awards and went on to win the overall prize as Book of the Year.
Chatwin's other books, published in his lifetime, were The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), a novel based on the slave trade, The songlines (1987), developing ideas that the songs of the Aborigines have deep cultural and personal significance, and Utz (1988), a novel dealing with an obsession with collecting.
Bruce Chatwin died in Nice at the age of 48 after contracting the Aids virus.
In Patagonia (1977)
The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980)
On the Black Hill (1982)
The songlines (1987)
Utz (1988)
Posthumously published works include:
What am I doing here? (1989)
Far journeys: Photographs and notebooks (1993)
Anatomy of restlessness: Selected writings 1969-1989
(1996)
With Chatwin; Portrait of a writer (1997)
Bruce Chatwin (1999)
Page created 21 February 2007 and last
updated 22 February 2007
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