His first book, In Patagonia (1977), established Chatwin as a travel writer, although he considered himself instead a storyteller, interested in bringing to light unusual tales.

[11] Later in life Chatwin recalled of the war, "Home, if we had one, was a solid black suitcase called the Rev-Robe, in which there was a corner for my clothes and my Mickey Mouse gas mask.

Among the items it contained was a "piece of brontosaurus" (actually a mylodon, a giant sloth), which had been sent to Chatwin's grandmother by her cousin Charles Milward.

[13] After the war, Chatwin lived with his parents and younger brother Hugh (1944 – 2012)[14][15][16] in West Heath in Birmingham, where his father had a law practice.

[20] Chatwin had hoped to read Classics at Merton College, Oxford, but the end of National Service in the United Kingdom meant there was more competition for university places.

He consulted eye specialist Patrick Trevor-Roper, who diagnosed a latent squint and recommended that Chatwin take a six-month break from his work at Sotheby's.

[55] Following his departure from Edinburgh, Chatwin decided to pursue a career as a writer, successfully pitching a book proposal on nomads to Tom Maschler, publisher at Jonathan Cape.

[68] Initially his role was to suggest story ideas and put together features such as "One Million Years of Art", which ran in several issues during the summer of 1973.

[70] Chatwin travelled on many international assignments, writing on such subjects as Algerian migrant workers and the Great Wall of China, and interviewing such diverse people as André Malraux, Maria Reiche, and Madeleine Vionnet.

[62][71] In 1972, Chatwin interviewed the 93-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map she had painted of the area of South America called Patagonia.

"[75] This marked the end of Chatwin's role as a regular writer for The Sunday Times Magazine, although in subsequent years he contributed occasional pieces, including a profile of Indira Gandhi.

[83] As a result of the success of In Patagonia, Chatwin's circle of friends expanded to include people like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Susan Sontag, and Jasper Johns.

[85] Chatwin intended his next project to be a biography of Francisco Félix de Sousa, a 19th-century slave trader born in Brazil, who became the Viceroy of Ouidah in Dahomey.

[90] Frustrated by the lack of documented information on de Sousa, Chatwin chose instead to write a fictionalised biography of him, The Viceroy of Ouidah.

[122] Chatwin provided different reasons to his doctors as to how he might have contracted HIV, including from a gang rape in Dahomey or possibly from Sam Wagstaff, the patron and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe.

[125] Although Chatwin never spoke or wrote publicly about his disease, in one instance he did write about the AIDS epidemic in 1988 in a letter to the editor of the London Review of Books, "The word 'Aids' is one of the cruellest and silliest neologisms of our time.

'Aid' means help, succour, comfort—yet with a hissing sibilant tacked onto the end it becomes a nightmare.... HIV (Human Immuno-Deficiency Virus) is a perfectly easy name to live with.

[129] Set in Prague, the novel details the life and death of Kaspar Utz, a man obsessed with his collection of Meissen porcelain.

[132] At the time of his death in 1989, he was working on a number of new ideas for novels, including a transcontinental epic provisionally titled Lydia Livingstone.

[136] The novelist Martin Amis described the memorial service in the essay "Salman Rushdie", included in his anthology Visiting Mrs Nabokov.

After his death, some members of the gay community criticised Chatwin for lack of courage to reveal the true nature of his illness, thinking he would have raised public awareness of AIDS, as he was one of the first high-profile individuals in Britain known to have contracted HIV.

[149] It begins as a novel narrated by a man named Bruce, but about two-thirds of the way through it becomes a commonplace book filled with quotations, anecdotes, and summaries of others' research, in an attempt to explore restlessness.

An admirer of Noël Coward, Chatwin found the breakfast scene in Private Lives helpful in learning to write dialogue.

[160][114] He thought humans were meant to be a migratory species, and once they settled in one place, their natural urges "found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new.

[164] "The theme of exile, of people living at the margins.... is treated in a literal and metaphorical sense throughout Chatwin's work," stated Nicholas Murray.

"[176] The combination of his clear, yet vivid prose and an international perspective at a time when many English writers were more focused on home instead of abroad helped to set him apart.

[184] The Songlines also inspired readers to travel to Australia and seek out the people on whom Chatwin had based his characters, much to their consternation, as he had failed to disclose such intentions to them.

[186] Nicholas Shakespeare stated that some of Chatwin's impact came from the difficulty of categorising his work, which helped to "set free other writers...[from] conventional boundaries.

[193] Mostly, these tended to be instances of embellishment, such as when Chatwin wrote of a nurse who loved the work of Osip Mandelstam – one of his favorite authors – when in fact she was a fan of Agatha Christie.

[196] Other criticism comes from anthropologists and other researchers who spent years studying Aboriginal culture and dismiss Chatwin's work because he visited Australia briefly.