Utz

Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield in 1940. He worked for Sotheby’s and the Sunday Times before announcing his departure in a telegram: ‘Gone to Patagonia for six months.’ This trip inspired the first of his books, In Patagonia, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the E.M. Forster Award and launched his writing career. Two of Chatwin’s 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. The Songlines was a Number 1 bestseller while On the Black Hill won the Whitbread First Novel Award and Utz was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize. He died in January 1989, aged forty-eight.