Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester is a British-American author and journalist. In his career at The Guardian newspaper, Winchester covered numerous significant events, including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. Winchester has written or contributed to over 30 best-selling nonfiction books, one novel, and several magazines, among them Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic.

Early life and education

Born in London, Winchester 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.

Career

While on assignment in Uganda, Winchester happened upon a copy of James Morris' 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 very 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, but 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 on the floor of the House of Commons when Bernadette Devlin described his role in reporting the shooting to death by British soldiers of Barney Watt in Hooker Street in the morning of Saturday, 6 February 1971.
After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming 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, published in 1983 and also in Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire, published in 1985 as well as Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories published in 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 fifteen years he contributed to a number of travel publications including Traveler, National Geographic and Smithsonian magazine.
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 truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller.
Though he still writes travel books, Winchester has 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 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. Winchester then published A Crack in the Edge of the World, a book about San Francisco's 1906 earthquake. The Man Who Loved China retells the life of the scholar Joseph Needham. The Alice Behind Wonderland, an exploration of the life and work of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 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. 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."

Personal life

On 4 July 2011 Winchester was naturalized as an American citizen in a ceremony aboard the USS Constitution. Winchester lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. He is the founder, editor and reporter of the Sandisfield Times, a hyper-local newspaper focused on issues in the small Berkshires town.

Works

Title	Year	ISBN	Publisher	Subject matter	Interviews and presentations	Comments
'	1974		Faber & Faber	The Troubles
American Heartbeat: Notes From a Midwest Journey	1976		Faber & Faber	Midwestern United States
Their Noble Lordships: Class and Power in Modern Britain	1982		Random House	Social class in the United Kingdom, British nobility
'	1983		Oxford University Press	British colonial architecture in India		Text by Jan Morris; photographs by Winchester
Prison Diary: Argentina	1983		Chatto & Windus
Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire	1985		Hodder & Stoughton	British Overseas Territories		Also published under the title The Sun Never Sets.
Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles	1988		HarperCollins	South Korea
Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Culture	1991		Simon & Schuster
Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons	1992		Stewart Tabori & Chang	Hong Kong		By Rich Browne, James Marshall and Simon Winchester.
Pacific Nightmare: How Japan Starts World War III : A Future History	1992		Birch Lane Press			Fiction
Small World: A Global Photographic Project, 1987–94	1995		Dewi Lewis Publishing			Written with Martin Parr.
The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time	1996		Picador	Yangtze River
The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words	1998		Viking Press	William Chester Minor, Sir James Murray, Oxford English Dictionary	, C-SPAN	Published in the United States as The Professor and the Madman
The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans	1999		HarperCollins	Breakup of Yugoslavia, Yugoslav Wars	, C-SPAN
The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology	2001		HarperCollins	William Smith	, C-SPAN by Powell's Books, 10 October 2006
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary	2003		Oxford University Press	Oxford English Dictionary	, C-SPAN
Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded	2003		HarperCollins	1883 eruption of Krakatoa	, C-SPAN
Simon Winchester's Calcutta	2004		Lonely Planet	Calcutta, India		A collection of writings about the Indian city, edited with his son Rupert Winchester.
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906	2005		HarperCollins	1906 San Francisco earthquake	, C-SPAN The Bat Segundo Show
The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom	2008		HarperCollins	Joseph Needham	, C-SPAN by Ramona Koval, The Book Show, ABC Radio National, 3 October 2008	Title of the UK edition: Bomb, Book & Compass.
Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories	2010		HarperCollins	History of the Atlantic Ocean	, C-SPAN , C-SPAN by Claudia Cragg, KGNU radio, 2 December 2010 , C-SPAN	Also published under the title Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean.
The Alice Behind Wonderland	2011		Oxford University Press	Alice Liddell
The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible	2013		HarperCollins		, C-SPAN The Bat Segundo Show
The Man with the Electrified Brain	2013		Byliner
When the Earth Shakes: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis	2015		Viking Books for Young Readers	Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis
Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers	2015		HarperCollins	History of the Pacific Ocean	, C-SPAN
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World	2018		HarperCollins	Precision engineering	, C-SPAN	Also published as Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World.
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World	2021		HarperCollins	Land tenure	, C-SPAN
Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic	2023		HarperCollins	Knowledge, Information Systems
The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind	2025		HarperCollins	Wind