Beloved client of Aitken Alexander Associates, Alexander Frater has passed away. Chasing The Monsoon remains in print with Picador.
Please find a wonderful piece on Frater’s legacy by Stephen J Fowler below.
You cannot live a fuller life and come out kinder and wiser than my friend, Alexander Frater, who died just upon the new year, after a time of illness. With his passing we witness the departure of a true luminary in a grand generation of travel writers, based in the UK, who reinvented, or invented, what we now take to be travel writing. From Norman Lewis, Freya Stark, Bruce Chatwin and Eric Newby, to Jan Morris, Colin Thubron and Patrick Leigh Fermor – Alexander Frater was a light amongst them, and a key figure in this remarkable era, commissioning, inspiring and instigating many of his peers while editor at the Observer magazine in the 70s and 80s.
He was a brilliant, distinct stylist – a writers’ writer, crafting absorbing, truthful, droll and enthusiastic books on travelling the earth through the later half of the 20th century. Always full of insight and wit, his books are very often subtle in their complexity, drawing portraits beyond the characters within them, beyond the places, anecdotes and experiences, beyond details of Alex’s own life, to lure the reader into meditations on culture, history, birth, death, illness and writing itself.
Click here to read more on the 3am Magazine website.