Bruce Chatwin was born in London in 1957. He was educated at Eton and the University of Sussex, where he received his PhD in English Literature in 1986. His literary career began when he won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for "The Songlines", a collection of short stories, which was published in 1987. This was followed by his first novel, The Viceroy of Ouidah, published in 1990
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In 1991 Chatwin's second novel, In Patagonia, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for travel writing. In 1994 he published The Songlines: A Journey on the Trail of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a collection of essays about the Andes, for which he received a "Writer's Award" from the Royal Geographical Society. In 1996 Chatwin's final book, The Mystery of queues and the Orderly Universe: Discovering Order through Complexity, was published to international acclaim.
This book became a bestseller and reached number one on the New York Times list. In 2003 he published The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, as well as two collections of short stories—Tropic of Capricorn and East