86 Facts About Bruce Chatwin

Charles Bruce Chatwin was an English travel writer, novelist and journalist.

Bruce Chatwin won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill, while his novel Utz was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Bruce Chatwin travelled the world for work and interviewed figures such as the politicians Indira Gandhi and Andre Malraux.

Bruce Chatwin left the magazine in 1974 to visit Patagonia, Argentina, a trip that inspired his first book, In Patagonia.

Bruce Chatwin wrote five other books, including The Songlines, about Australia, which was a bestseller.

Bruce Chatwin's work is credited with reviving the genre of travel writing, and his works influenced other writers such as William Dalrymple, Claudio Magris, Philip Marsden, Luis Sepulveda, Rich Cohen, and Rory Stewart.

Bruce Chatwin was born on 13 May 1940 at the Shearwood Road Nursing Home in Sheffield, England, to Charles Leslie Bruce Chatwin, a Birmingham solicitor and Royal Naval Reserve officer during World War II, and Margharita, daughter of a Sheffield knife manufacturer's clerk.

Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield and worked for the local Conservative party prior to her marriage.

Bruce Chatwin took her son with her as they travelled to stay with various relatives during the war.

Bruce Chatwin sent his cousin a piece of the animal's skin, and members of the family mistakenly referred to it as a "piece of brontosaurus".

An unexceptional student, Bruce Chatwin garnered attention from his performances in school plays.

Bruce Chatwin had hoped to read Classics at Merton College, Oxford, but the end of National Service in the United Kingdom meant there was more competition for university places.

Bruce Chatwin's parents discouraged the ideas he offered: an acting career or work in the Colonial Service in Kenya.

An interview was arranged, and Bruce Chatwin secured a job there.

In 1958, Bruce Chatwin moved to London to begin work as a porter in the Works of Art department at Sotheby's.

Bruce Chatwin was ill-suited for this job, which included dusting objects that had been kept in storage.

Many of Bruce Chatwin's colleagues thought he would eventually become chairman of the auction house.

Bruce Chatwin used these trips to visit markets and shops, where he would buy antiques that he would resell at a profit in order to supplement his income from Sotheby's.

Bruce Chatwin became friends with artists, art collectors and dealers.

Bruce Chatwin consulted eye specialist Patrick Trevor-Roper, who diagnosed a latent squint and recommended that Chatwin take a six-month break from his work at Sotheby's.

Trevor-Roper had been involved in the design of an eye hospital in Addis Ababa, and suggested Bruce Chatwin visit East Africa.

Bruce Chatwin returned to Sotheby's, and to the surprise of his friends, proposed marriage to Elizabeth Chanler.

Bruce Chatwin was bisexual throughout their married life, a circumstance Elizabeth knew and accepted.

Bruce Chatwin had hoped he would "grow out of" his homosexual behaviour and have a successful marriage like his parents.

Bruce Chatwin enrolled in October 1966 at the University of Edinburgh to study Archaeology.

Bruce Chatwin had regretted not attending Oxford and had been contemplating going to university for a few years.

Between 1969 and 1972, as he was working on The Nomadic Alternative, Bruce Chatwin travelled extensively and pursued other endeavours in an attempt to establish a creative career.

Bruce Chatwin co-curated an exhibit on Nomadic Art of the Asian Steppes, which opened at Asia House Gallery in New York City in 1970.

Bruce Chatwin considered publishing an account of his 1969 trip to Afghanistan with Peter Levi.

Bruce Chatwin contributed two articles on nomads to Vogue and another article to History Today.

Bruce Chatwin pitched stories to him for possible films, which Ivory did not take seriously.

In 1972 Bruce Chatwin tried his hand at film-making and travelled to Niger to make a documentary about nomads.

The film was lost while Bruce Chatwin was trying to sell it to European television companies.

Bruce Chatwin took photographs of his journeys and attempted to sell photographs from a trip to Mauritania to The Sunday Times Magazine.

Bruce Chatwin travelled on many international assignments, writing on such subjects as Algerian migrant workers and the Great Wall of China, and interviewing such diverse people as Andre Malraux, Maria Reiche, and Madeleine Vionnet.

In 1972, Bruce Chatwin interviewed the 93-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map she had painted of the area of South America called Patagonia.

Two years later, in November 1974, Bruce Chatwin flew out to Lima in Peru, and reached Patagonia, Argentina, a month later.

Bruce Chatwin spent six months in Patagonia, travelling around gathering stories of people who came from elsewhere and settled there.

Bruce Chatwin used his quest for his own "piece of brontosaurus" to frame the story of his trip.

Bruce Chatwin intended his next project to be a biography of Francisco Felix de Sousa, a 19th-century slave trader born in Brazil, who became the Viceroy of Ouidah in Dahomey.

Bruce Chatwin had first heard of de Sousa during a visit to Dahomey in 1972.

Bruce Chatwin returned to the country, by then renamed the People's Republic of Benin, in December 1976 to conduct research.

In January 1977, during the 1977 Benin coup d'etat attempt, Bruce Chatwin was accused of being a mercenary and detained for three days.

Frustrated by the lack of documented information on de Sousa, Bruce Chatwin chose instead to write a fictionalised biography of him, The Viceroy of Ouidah.

Nicholas Shakespeare said that the dismal sales caused Bruce Chatwin to pursue a completely different subject for his next book.

Bruce Chatwin continued to have affairs with men, but most of these affairs were short-lived.

Bruce Chatwin is one of the few men Mapplethorpe photographed fully clothed.

Bruce Chatwin later contributed the introduction to a book of Mapplethorpe's photographs, Lady, Lisa Lyon.

In 1983 Bruce Chatwin returned to the topic of nomads and decided to focus on Aboriginal Australians.

Bruce Chatwin was influenced by the work of Ted Strehlow, the author of Songs of Central Australia.

Bruce Chatwin went to Australia to learn more about Aboriginal culture, specifically the songlines or dreaming tracks.

Bruce Chatwin thought the songlines could be used as a metaphor to support his ideas about humans' need to wander, which he believed was genetic.

Bruce Chatwin spent several weeks in 1983 and 1984 in Australia, during which he primarily relied on non-Aboriginal people for information, as he was limited by his inability to speak the Aboriginal languages.

Bruce Chatwin interviewed people involved in the Land Rights movement, and he alienated many of them because he was oblivious to the politics and because he was an admirer of Strehlow's work.

Bruce Chatwin's illness did him a favour, got him free of it.

Bruce Chatwin published The Songlines in 1987, and it became a bestseller in the United Kingdom and in the United States.

The book was nominated for the Thomas Cook Travel Award, but Bruce Chatwin requested that it be withdrawn from consideration, saying the work was fictional.

Bruce Chatwin's case was unusual as he had a fungal infection, Talaromyces marneffei, which at the time had rarely been seen and only in South Asia.

Bruce Chatwin wanted to protect his parents, who were unaware of his homosexual affairs.

Bruce Chatwin edited a collection of his journalism, which was published as What Am I Doing Here.

Bruce Chatwin died at a hospital in Nice on 18 January 1989.

In 1985, suffering from a mysterious illness Bruce Chatwin interrupted his writing to make a pilgrimage to Mount Athos.

Bruce Chatwin's ashes were scattered near a Byzantine chapel above Kardamyli in the Peloponnese.

Bruce Chatwin had spent several months in 1985 near there, working on The Songlines.

Bruce Chatwin's papers, including 85 moleskine notebooks, were given to the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Some of Bruce Chatwin's critics did not think he succeeded in The Songlines with this approach, but others applauded his effort at an unconventional structure.

Bruce Chatwin admitted to imitating the work of Robert Byron when he first began making notes of his travels.

Bruce Chatwin's biographer described the resulting prose as "quick snapshots of ordinary people".

An admirer of Noel Coward, Bruce Chatwin found the breakfast scene in Private Lives helpful in learning to write dialogue.

Once Bruce Chatwin began work on The Viceroy of Ouidah, he began studying the work of 19th-century French authors such as Honore de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, who would continue to influence him for the rest of his life.

Bruce Chatwin explored several different themes in his work: human restlessness and wandering; borders and exile; and art and objects.

Bruce Chatwin considered human restlessness to be the focus of his writing.

Bruce Chatwin ultimately aspired to explore the subject in order to answer what he saw as a fundamental question of human existence.

Bruce Chatwin attempted to explain restlessness in The Songlines, which focused on the Aboriginal Australians' walkabout.

Bruce Chatwin returned to the subject of art and objects during his career.

Bruce Chatwin constantly struggled with the conflicting desires to own beautiful items and to live in a space free of unnecessary objects.

Bruce Chatwin's books inspired some readers to visit Patagonia and Australia.

The Songlines inspired readers to travel to Australia and seek out the people on whom Bruce Chatwin had based his characters, much to their consternation, as he had failed to disclose such intentions to them.

Beyond travel, Bruce Chatwin influenced other writers, such as Claudio Magris, Luis Sepulveda, Philip Marsden, and William Dalrymple.

Bruce Chatwin preferred to call his writing stories or searches.

Bruce Chatwin was interested in asking big questions about human existence, sharing unusual tales, and making connections between ideas from various sources.

The accuracy problem had arisen before his death, and Bruce Chatwin had admitted to "counting up the lies" in In Patagonia, though he stated there were not many.

However, Bruce Chatwin's biographer found one farmer who was featured in the book who thought Bruce Chatwin's depictions of himself and other members of his community were truthful.

Once it became known that Bruce Chatwin had been bisexual and had died of an AIDS-related illness, some critics viewed him as a liar and dismissed his work.

Bruce Chatwin wrote in The Songlines of little black oilskin-covered notebooks that he bought in Paris and called "moleskines".

The quotes and anecdotes he had compiled in them serve as a major section of The Songlines, where Bruce Chatwin mourned the closure of the last producer of such books.