 This work established Chatwin 's reputation as a travel writer . One of his biographers , Nicholas Murray , called In Patagonia " one of the most strikingly original postwar English travel books " and said that it revitalised the genre of travel writing . However , residents in the region contradicted the account of events depicted in Chatwin 's book . It was the first time in his career , but not the last , that conversations and characters which Chatwin presented as fact were later alleged to be fiction . 
