https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/alexanderfrater/ 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.
He was perhaps best known for his book Chasing the Monsoon and I met him in India, in 2016, at a literary festival. I watched first-hand how revered he was for this work, and how surprised he was, and slightly discomforted, by the attention it brought him. In India his book still sells hundreds of copies a month, years after it was published. I watched Alex shine light on others as he was praised. His charisma, his distinct charm and verve, were evident from seeing him speak, but getting to know him I found he possessed the kind of measured, honest humility that was palpable, balanced with his marked intellect, which he wore lightly. He was a man who had travelled to, and written about, almost every single country on this planet, through warzones and dictatorships, tracing history across generations and wore this experience in his personality. It occurs to me that if travel grows the soul, well then that explains Alex.
