Simon Winchester obit

Simon Winchester dead: Famous author dies aged 82 after heart attack on family farm

 

He was not on the list.

A British-American journalist, author and former geologist has sadly died. Simon Winchester, 82, died on Tuesday on his farm in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, from a heart attack, his wife, Setsuko Sato, announced. Born in London, he spent much of his career working as a foreign correspondent. He joined The Guardian in 1969, initially as a regional correspondent in Newcastle upon Tyne before later becoming the newspaper's Northern Ireland correspondent. Winchester reported on several major events of the Northern Ireland Troubles, including Bloody Sunday and the 1972 Belfast bombings, known as Bloody Friday.

While working as a correspondent for The Guardian in Washington, DC, Winchester covered the Watergate affair, the resignation of President Nixon, and the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency.

During his time in Washington, he published his first book, "In Holy Terror," based on his years as a reporter in Northern Ireland.

In 1982, while covering Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands for The Sunday Times, Winchester was arrested on suspicion of espionage and held captive for three months in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego.

His work as a freelance correspondent during the mid 80s saw him travel by train from London to Moscow, Irkutsk and Ulan Bator to take up a new assignment in Hong Kong.

He remained based in China for the next 12 years which saw him rejoin the Guardian and also accepted a freelance assignment as Asia Editor of the newly-established Conde Nast Traveler magazine, based in New York.

Following the handover of Hong Kong in the summer of 1997, Winchester went to live in New York.

Throughout his career Winchester wrote over 30 books, his breakthrough coming in 1998 when he was living in New York, with the publication of "The Professor and the Madman," about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.

He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) 'for services to journalism and literature' in the New Year Honours list for 2006 and was elected an Honorary Fellow of St. Catherine's College, Oxford, in October 2009.

Winchester 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 as an author was The Professor and the Madman (1998).

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 (1998), a New York Times best seller.

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.