What Am I Doing Here?

As a writer he was unclassifiably interesting: lucid, ironic, cool. He seemed to owe nothing to anybody. – Colin Thubron * Sunday Times *Chatwin is equally fascinating on places. He goes yeti-hunting in Nepal, and magnificently evokes the Himalayas’ seductive harshness. He visits Afghanistan in the steps of his own favourite writer, Robert Byron, and reveals something no current news report ever succeeds in doing why anyone should want to spend time in that beautiful, tormented land…human existence at least as Chatwin sees it is gloriously open-ended, unpredictable and exotic * Sunday Times *One of its chief delights is that it contains so many of its author’sbest anecdotes, his choicest performances – Salman Rushdie * Observer *I like the combination of its far-reaching quality and the minute precision with which his thoughts are charted – Rose Tremain * Sunday Times *All the writing in this volume demonstrates Bruce Chatwin’s loathing of the humdrum, the dreary, the predictable. What attracted him was the unusual, the weird and wonderful… the journalist in him (strongly present) knew a good story when it heard one – Margaret Forster * Guardian *As one reads it one cannot forget it was compiled by a uniquely gifted writer in the face of death, urgently pinning down experiences important to him. All that might suggest a scrapbook, but as a legendary traveller and observer of people Chatwin had more to put into his than most * Mail on Sunday *

Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield in 1940. After attending Marlborough School he began work as a porter at Sotheby’s. Eight years later, having become one of Sotheby’s youngest directors, he abandoned his job to pursue his passion for world travel. Between 1972 and 1975 he worked for the Sunday Times, before announcing his next departure in a telegram- ‘Gone to Patagonia for six months.’ This trip inspired the first of Chatwin’s books, In Patagonia, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the E.M. Forster Award and launched his writing career. Two of his books have been made into feature films- The Viceroy of Ouidah (retitled Cobra Verde), directed by Werner Herzog, and Andrew Grieve’s On the Black Hill. On publication The Songlines went straight to Number 1 in the Sunday Times bestseller list and remained in the top ten for nine months. On the Black Hill won the Whitbread First Novel Award while his novel Utz was nominated for the 1988 Booker Prize. He died in January 1989, aged forty-eight.

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