Alexander Frater 1937 – 2020
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 British travel writers, 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.
Steven J Fowler remembers the great British travel writer Alexander Frater.
What Is (and Isn’t) Literature?
As the editor of American Book Review, Di Leo knows better than most how easily worthy authors can be overlooked: that journal is devoted to covering interesting but nonmainstream literary works, most from small and university presses, that tend to be ignored by the review media. But the other problem with spreading the literature net too far is that it can skew one’s understanding of literary (not cultural) history. Taking his cue from Marcus and Sollers, Di Leo not only describes the sixteenth-century travel accounts of European explorers of America as “significant works in the present-day canon of American literature,” but argues that this “literature”–his word–“shared many of the concerns and texts traditionally reserved only for world literature”.
By Steven Moore.