Watch – In conversation with Jonathan Chatwin and Susannah Clapp

This was an exclusive live event for Saga customers, recorded in September 2021.

Experience it again below.

In Patagonia

Beautifully written and full of wonderful descriptions and intriguing tales, In Patagonia is an account of Bruce Chatwin's travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and his encounters with the people whose fascinating stories delay him on the road.

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. 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.

It is hard to pin down what makes In Patagonia so unique, but, in the end, it is Chatwin’s brilliant personality that makes it what it is... His form of travel was not about getting from A to B. It was about internal landscapes.
Sunday Times

About Susannah Clapp and Jonathan Chatwin

Susannah Clapp is Chatwin’s literary executor and is the author of With Chatwin, an acclaimed portrait of Bruce Chatwin. She has worked as a publisher’s reader and editor, radio critic of the Sunday Times and theatre critic of the New Statesman. She has reviewed novels and non-fiction for the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, the The Sunday Times, The Observer, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman and the Independent on Sunday.

Jonathan Chatwin is a non-fiction writer and journalist, and the author of Anywhere Out of the World: The work of Bruce Chatwin. Acclaimed in the TLS as ‘the best account yet of the origins of [Bruce] Chatwin's restless mania,’ Anywhere Out of the World explores both the life and literature of Bruce Chatwin, drawing on previously unseen archival material.

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