A guest of the tribes, she conjures little girls in magenta silk trousers, their silver anklets frilled with bells the drumbeats of the Sultan's procession and veiled women bearing gifts of salted melon seeds. William Dalrymple's latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury, £8.99), won the first Asia House Literature Award, in 2010Ī Winter in Arabia describes Freya Stark's 1937 journey through the Hadhramaut, a region in today's Yemen.

God only knows what Chatwin might have produced had he still been writing, now when we need him most. He also knew and loved the Islamic world – and such writers are now badly in demand. Yet to his fans, Chatwin remains like a showy bird of paradise amid the sparrows of the present English literary scene, and it is impossible to reread In Patagonia without a deep stab of sadness that we have lost the brightest and most profound writer of his generation. The pendulum of fashion has swung against Chatwin, and it is now unhip to admire his work. All three talents shine brightly on almost every page of In Patagonia, but it is his bleak chiselled prose that remains his most dazzling: he had a quite remarkable ability to evoke place, to bring to life a whole world of strange sounds and smells in a single unexpected image, to pull a perfect sentence out the air with the ease of a child netting a butterfly. Its opening page – telling of Bruce's childhood discovery of a piece of dinosaur skin in his grandmother's cupboard – is possibly the most imitated passage in modern travel literature.Ĭhatwin had three matchless gifts: he was a thinker of genuine originality a reader of astonishing erudition and a writer of breathtaking prose. But it is probably the most influential travel book written since the war. It is in the eyes of many his best, though it was not his most commercially successful (Songlines outsold it many times over). His first, In Patagonia, is a metaphysical exploration of 'the uttermost part of the earth'. When Bruce Chatwin died in 1989, at 48, he had published just five books: a small yet dazzling output.

The worst journey