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When a journalist abruptly informs his editor “Have gone to Patagonia”, either he will never be heard of again or he will return with something worth writing about. Bruce Chatwin, born in Sheffield in 1940, went to South America in 1974 and three years later published In Patagonia, which has become an enduring cult classic of travel literature. It was later claimed that in this and other of his works presented as travel books, such as The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), and The Songlines (1987), being true to fact, was not Chatwin’s primary strength or interest. He openly acknowledged that “the fictional process has been at work”. His novels, like his nonfiction and essays, are so infused with the transforming power of the storyteller’s art that they become fantastical, just as the writer became his own creation. He died in 1989 of an Aids-related disease, claiming to the last that it was a rare infection picked up on his travels.

One to read: On the Black Hill (1982)

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Read an excerpt from In Patagonia on Google Books

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