Simon Winchester

Simon Bernard Adrian Winchester (28 September 1944 – 3 November 2026) was a British and naturalised American author and journalist. During his career at The Guardian newspaper, Winchester covered numerous significant events, including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. He wrote or contributed to over 30 best-selling nonfiction books, one novel, and several magazines, among them Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic. His breakthrough book was The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998), published in North America as The Professor and the Madman.

Born in London to Bernard and Andrée (de Wael) Winchester, Simon attended several boarding schools in Dorset, including Hardye's School. He spent a year hitchhiking around the United States, then in 1963 went up to St Catherine's College, Oxford, to study geology. He graduated in 1966, and found work with Falconbridge Nickel Mines, a Canadian mining company. His first assignment was to work as a field geologist searching for copper deposits in Uganda.

While on assignment in Uganda, Winchester happened upon a copy of James Morris's Coronation Everest, an account of the 1953 expedition that led to the first successful ascent of Mount Everest. The book instilled in Winchester the desire to be a writer, so he wrote to Morris seeking career advice. Morris urged Winchester to give up geology the same day he received the letter and get a job as a writer on a newspaper.

In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first as a regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne and later as its Northern Ireland correspondent. Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast "Hour of Terror". In 1971, Winchester became involved in a controversy over the British press's coverage of Northern Ireland when Bernadette Devlin described, on the floor of the House of Commons, his role in reporting the shooting to death by British soldiers of Barney Watt on Hooker Street on the morning of 6 February 1971.

After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming a correspondent for The Guardian in Washington, DC, where he covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency.

In 1982, while working as chief foreign feature writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held for three months as a prisoner in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego. He wrote about this event in his book Prison Diary (1983) and also in Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire (1985) as well as Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories (2010), in which he tells of meeting up with one of his jailers many years later. In 1985, he shifted to working as a freelance writer and travelled to Hong Kong. When Condé Nast re-branded Signature magazine as Condé Nast Traveler, Winchester was appointed its Asia-Pacific editor. Over the following 15 years he contributed to a number of travel publications including theTraveler, National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines.

Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror, was published by Faber and Faber in 1975. The book drew heavily on his experiences of the turmoil in Northern Ireland. In 1976 he published his second book, American Heartbeat, which deals with his travels through the American heartland. Winchester's first major popular success was The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998) which became a New York Times best seller under its North American title The Professor and the Madman.

Though he still wrote travel books, Winchester used the narrative non-fiction form he adopted for The Professor and the Madman several more times, resulting in multiple best-selling books. The Map that Changed the World (2001) focuses on the geologist William Smith and was Winchester's second New York Times best seller. The year 2003 saw the publication of The Meaning of Everything, which returns to the topic of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, and of the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (Viking Press]). Winchester then published A Crack in the Edge of the World, a book about San Francisco's 1906 earthquake. The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of the scholar Joseph Needham. The Alice Behind Wonderland, an exploration of the life and work of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), and his relationship with Alice Liddell, was published in 2011.

Winchester's book on the Pacific Ocean, Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers, was published in 2015. It was his second book about the Pacific region, his first, Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Culture having been published in 1991. Before this, in the mid-1980s, Winchester managed to set foot on the secretive island of Diego Garcia (which is the largest island of the Chagos Archipelago in the British Indian Ocean Territory). Winchester pretended that his boat had run into trouble next to the island, and remained in the bay for about two days. He managed to step on shore briefly before being escorted away, and was told by British authorities: "Go away and don't come back."

On 4 July 2011, Winchester was naturalized as an American citizen in a ceremony aboard the USS Constitution. With his wife Setsuko, he had three children. Winchester lived in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. He was the founder, editor and reporter of the Sandisfield Times, a hyper-local newspaper focused on issues in the small Berkshires town.

Simon Winchester died from a heart attack at his farm in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, on 3 November 2026, aged 82.

• Winchester was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for "services to journalism and literature" in Queen Elizabeth II's New Year Honours list of 2006.
• Winchester was named an honorary fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, in October 2009.
• Winchester received an honorary degree from Dalhousie University in Canada in October 2010.
• Winchester received the Lawrence J. Burpee Medal and was elected a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society in November 2016.