Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester was born in north London on 28 September 1944, the only child of Bernard and Andrée Winchester (née deWael). Although the family was not Catholic, he was first sent to a boarding convent in Bridport, Dorset, and then to Hardye's School in Dorchester. He later recalled being appointed head of house there and soon afterwards expelled for a destructive chemistry experiment in the school's new science laboratories. Before university he spent almost a year hitchhiking around Canada and the United States. He grew up with a strong attachment to small communities, later describing his roots in a one-pub town in southwest England.

In 1963 Winchester went up to St Catherine's College, Oxford, to read geology, graduating in 1966. At Oxford he joined the University Exploration Club and in 1965 was one of six members of a sledging expedition onto an uncharted section of the East Greenland ice cap. Geology remained a thread through his later books, most clearly in The Map That Changed the World, Krakatoa and A Crack in the Edge of the World. St Catherine's elected him an honorary fellow in October 2009.

After Oxford, Winchester worked as a field geologist for Falconbridge in Uganda. Reading Coronation Everest by James (later Jan) Morris in a jungle camp persuaded him to become a writer, and Morris advised him to quit geology and join a newspaper. He started as a junior reporter on The Journal in Newcastle upon Tyne, then joined The Guardian in 1969. As Northern Ireland correspondent he covered internment, Bloody Sunday and Operation Motorman and was named Britain's Journalist of the Year in 1971. He was The Guardian's Washington correspondent during Watergate and the Carter election, then India correspondent from 1977, briefly American bureau chief for the Daily Mail, and chief foreign feature writer for The Sunday Times. In 1982 he was held for three months in prison in Ushuaia, Argentina, during the Falklands War after being suspected of spying. From 1985 he worked from Hong Kong as a freelance correspondent and Asia-Pacific editor of Condé Nast Traveler, contributing to National Geographic and Smithsonian. In the mid 1980s he famously set foot on Diego Garcia by pretending his boat was in trouble, before British officials told him to go away and not come back.

Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror (1974), drew on his Northern Ireland reporting. His breakthrough came in 1998 with The Professor and the Madman (published in Britain as The Surgeon of Crowthorne), about William Chester Minor and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. It became a New York Times best seller and was adapted into the 2019 film The Professor and the Madman. He followed it with The Map That Changed the World (2001), The Meaning of Everything and Krakatoa (2003), A Crack in the Edge of the World (2005), The Man Who Loved China (2008, Bomb, Book and Compass in Britain), Atlantic (2010), The Alice Behind Wonderland (2011), The Men Who United the States (2013), Pacific (2015), The Perfectionists (2018, also titled Exactly), Land (2021), Knowing What We Know (2023) and The Breath of the Gods (2025). Earlier works include Outposts (1985), Korea (1988), Pacific Rising (1991), The River at the Center of the World (1996) and his only novel, Pacific Nightmare (1992). He wrote or contributed to more than 30 books.

Winchester's first marriage, to Catherine Evans, ended in divorce. He later married Setsuko Sato, a New York born ceramic artist, photographer and former WNYC and NPR producer, who became known as Setsuko Winchester. His son Rupert Winchester co-edited the anthology Simon Winchester's Calcutta (2004). Winchester became a US citizen on 4 July 2011 aboard USS Constitution. He and Setsuko lived on a farm in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, in a restored 18th century house with an apple orchard for cider, chickens, a family goose and a converted granary he used as his writing library. He also kept a home in New York. His hobbies included letterpress printing, bee keeping, astronomy, stamp collecting, model railways and collecting barometers and clocks.

Winchester was a great admirer of American democracy and of the New England town meeting in particular, calling it the purest form of democracy one can have, while insisting that people need to be informed and government held accountable. That conviction led him to found the Sandisfield Times in 2010 and to serve as Sandisfield's town moderator. As a lifelong newspaperman he believed that behind every front door there is a story. His later books explored how knowledge is passed on, how land ownership shaped the modern world and how precision engineering both built and constrained modern life.

Winchester helped popularise a style of narrative nonfiction that found gripping human stories inside subjects such as lexicography, geology and engineering. The Professor and the Madman sold millions of copies from an initial print run of about 10,000 and brought the history of the Oxford English Dictionary to a mass audience. His C-SPAN interviews and many library and festival talks made him a familiar voice for readers in Britain and America. Locally, the Sandisfield Times, which he founded, continued as a volunteer paper that residents credited with bringing the town together.

Britain's Journalist of the Year (1971). Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to journalism and literature, New Year Honours 2006. Honorary Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford (2009). Honorary degree from Dalhousie University, Canada (2010). Lawrence J. Burpee Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (2016).

The Professor and the Madman was adapted as a 2019 feature film. Winchester appeared frequently on C-SPAN, including a Booknotes interview in 1998, an In Depth programme in 2004 and a Q&A interview in 2011, and he was a regular contributor to BBC radio from his Northern Ireland years onward. He wrote for The Guardian, Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic and Smithsonian, and gave talks at libraries and book festivals across the United States.

Simon Winchester died of a heart attack at his farm in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, on 3 November 2026, aged 82. His death was reported by The New York Times on 4 November 2026. Funeral and burial arrangements had not been made public at the time this page was written.