With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer
Susannah Clapp
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.
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About Susannah Clapp
Reviews for With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer
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