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With Chatwin
  • Published: 6 February 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099733713
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $39.99

With Chatwin

Portrait of a Writer

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'Excellent, absorbing, affectionate, unillusioned, vivid and affecting' - Craig Raine, Financial Times

Few writers have had as many distinct lives as Bruce Chatwin and few have been as compelling in person as in print. Chatwin was a traveller, an aesthete and an anthropologist. In his twenties he was a star at Sotheby's; in his thirties he was a star at The Sunday Times. A solitary man and a socialite; he was always exotic. He became famous as the person who reinvented travel-writing and when he died in 1989, aged 48, he had published six strikingly varied books.

Susannah Clapp's book is not a biography, but collects her own memories of Chatwin and those of his friends, acquaintances and colleagues, with the aim of producing a chronology of the author's life and, more important, of illuminating particular fields of interest. This is not merely a celebratory volume, but a investigatory one, illustrated with photographs of and by Bruce Chatwin.
  • Published: 6 February 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099733713
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $39.99
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About the author

Susannah Clapp

Susannah Clapp is the author of With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer. She worked as an editor and reader at Jonathan Cape. She helped to found the London Review of Books, where she was assistant editor for several years. She is currently the theatre critic of the Observer and a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio.

SC

Praise for With Chatwin

With Chatwin is not a full-scale biography, but rather a fresh, vivid portrait, organised more or less chronologically, though built up around certain key themes... a novel and suitably unponderous way of depicting someone so mercurial. It's a very funny book... full of subtle and revealing insights

Edmund White, Times Literary Supplement

An enchanting memoir... neatly packed with precisely the kind of detailed observation that renders such portraits compelling... Appropriately enough, [Susannah Clapp] has adopted Chatwin's own connoisseurishly boastful style, the better to display all his rarities, coups and unrepeatable trophies... With Chatwin is, as its title hints, virtually an addition to Chatwin's own oeuvre

David Sexton, Sunday Telegraph

A beautiful memoir... fascinating

Ian Buruma, Spectator

An affectionate, frank and skilful portrait

Jan Morris, Literary Review
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