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   Simon Winchester: Biography

Simon Winchester biography, plus links to book reviews and book excerpts from books by Simon Winchester.

Simon Winchester
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Simon Winchester Biography

Author, journalist, and broadcaster Simon Winchester has worked as a foreign correspondent for most of his career. Before joining his first newspaper in 1967, however, he graduated from Oxford with a degree in geology and spent a year working as a geologist in the Ruwenzori Mountains in western Uganda and on oil rigs in the North Sea. His journalistic work, mainly for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, has seen him based in Belfast; Washington, D.C.; New Delhi; New York; London; and Hong Kong, where he covered such stories as the Ulster crisis, the creation of Bangladesh, the fall of President Marcos, the Watergate affair, the Jonestown Massacre, the assassination of Egypt's President Sadat, the death and cremation of Pol Pot, and the 1982 Falklands War. During the Falklands conflict, he was arrested and spent three months in prison in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, on spying charges.

Winchester has been a freelance writer since 1987. He now works principally as an author, though he contributes to a number of American and British magazines and journals, including Harper's, Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Spectator, Granta, the New York Times, and The Atlantic. He was appointed Asia-Pacific editor of Condé Nast Traveler at its inception in 1987, and later became editor-at­large. His writing has won him several awards, including British Journalist of the Year. He writes and presents television films on a variety of historical topics—including a series on the final years of colonial Hong Kong—and is a frequent contributor to the BBC radio program From Our Own Correspondent.

Winchester also lectures widely—most recently before London's Royal Geographical Society (of which he is a Fellow) and to audiences aboard the cruise liners QE2 and Seabourn Pride. His books cover a wide range of subjects: the remnants of the British Empire, the colonial architecture of India, aristocracy, the American Midwest, his months in an Argentine prison on spying charges, his description of a six­month walk through the Korean Peninsula, and the Pacific Ocean and the future of China.

More recently he has written The River at the Center of the World, about China's Yangtze River; the bestselling The Professor and the Madman, which is to be made into a major motion picture by distinguished French director Luc Besson; The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans, which recounts his journey from Austria to Turkey during the 1999 Kosovo crisis; and the bestselling The Map That Changed the World, about the nineteenth-century geologist William Smith. His recent books Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (April 2003) and A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (October 2005) both have been New York Times bestsellers and have appeared on numerous best of and notable lists.

Simon Winchester lives in New York City and has a small farm in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Mr. Winchester was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty The Queen in 2006. He received the honor in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

This biography was last updated on 05/12/2009.

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