Bruce Chatwin - Nicholas Shakespeare (First edition)

Bruce Chatwin’s death from AIDS in 1989 brought a meteoric career to an abrupt end. His reputation as a storyteller has grown over the last decade, and his exquisite, subtle texts continue to inspire readers all over the world. 'Of my contemporaries he had the most erudite and possibly the most brilliant mind I ever came across,' says Salman Rushdie. He was, in the view of Werner Herzog, the ultimate storyteller: 'It’s the resonance of the voice and the depth of his vision that make him one of the truly great writers of our time.' And to Patrick Leigh Fermor he seemed 'one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met.'

Chatwin burst onto the literary scene in 1977 with his first book, In Patagonia, which changed for a generation the definition of travel writing and brought a fresh lustre to modern English letters. The uncategorisable books that followed—The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines and Utz—confirmed his status as a major writer able to reinvent himself constantly. But how much do readers who feel they have travelled with him to South America, Africa, Wales, Australia, and Europe actually know the real Bruce Chatwin?

He was different things to different people: a director at Sotheby’s with an unerring eye for detail; an archaeologist present at the finding of the evidence of man’s earliest use of fire; a successful Sunday Times journalist; a photographer; an art collector; a restless traveller and a best-selling author. Married for 23 years, he was also an active homosexual. A socialite who loved to mix with the rich and famous, he was a single-minded loner who explored the limits of extreme solitude. Melancholic and manic, intense and uproariously funny, he loved most of all to tell stories—about his friends, about the people he met on his many travels and about himself.

In 1991, Nicholas Shakespeare was given unrestricted access to Chatwin’s private notebooks, diaries and letters. Across five continents he has gathered evidence from Chatwin’s peers, his friends, his family, his hosts, his enemies and his lovers. Looking for the Chatwin behind the masks, he has written the definitive biography of one of the most charismatic and elusive literary figures of our time.