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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