Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester is a British-American author and journalist, best known for works of narrative non-fiction and history.

After abandoning his career as a geologist to become a journalist, Winchester wrote for the Guardian, covering the Northern Irish Troubles at their peak in the early 1970s, and for the Sunday Times, during which time he was imprisoned in Tierra del Fuego whilst reporting on the Falklands War.

Although Winchester’s first book was published in 1975, it was not until 1998 that he achieved mainstream success with The Surgeon of Crowthorne, about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. He has since written numerous other acclaimed works of non-fiction, such as The Map That Changed the World, The Meaning of Everything, Krakatoa and Land.