Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin arrived at travel writing from art — he was a director at Sotheby's and a journalist before he sent his editor at the Sunday Times a telegram in 1974 saying he had "gone to Patagonia" and not returned. In Patagonia, published in 1977, was the result.

The book is short, elliptical, and entirely original. It moves between fragments — a story about Butch Cassidy's last years, a family of Welsh settlers who had been in Patagonia for a century, a monstrous sloth that may or may not have been killed in the 1890s — with no conventional narrative thread. Each chapter is a mosaic piece, and the total picture only emerges at a distance.

The Songlines (1987) applied the same method to Australia — specifically to the Aboriginal concept of songlines, invisible paths across the landscape that simultaneously record history and provide direction. It mixes fiction, anthropology, philosophy, and personal narrative.

Chatwin was working on a theory of nomadism throughout his career — the idea that humans are essentially migratory, that settlement is unnatural, that the pathologies of modern life come from staying put. It's a theory that his own restlessness both illustrated and complicated.

He died of AIDS in 1989, aged 48. The argument about whether his books are travel writing, fiction, or something else has continued ever since.