British American writer Simon Winchester, who wrote dozens of bestselling nonfiction books while contributing to Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, and the Guardian, died November 3 at age 82. Winchester witnessed the Troubles as a Northern Ireland correspondent for the Guardian, including Bloody Sunday and a rapid string of car bombings in Belfast called the "Hour of Terror," which inspired his first book, In Holy Terror, published by Faber and Faber in 1975. His second book, American Heartbeat (1976) came after working as the Guardian's Washington, D.C., correspondent during the end of the Nixon administration and beginning of Carter's presidency. Winchester happened to be in the Falkland Islands during Argentina's 1982 invasion, which led to the books Prison Diary (1983), Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire (1985), as well as Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories (2010).
Winchester is best known for The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (originally titled The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words in England in 1998). The Professor and the Madman chronicles the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and how one of its earliest and most prolific contributors, William Chester Minor, was a retired United States Army surgeon living in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, near the village of Crowthorne, England. The book's major success prompted a wider history of the OED, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, in 2003.
Winchester's other books include The Map that Changed the World (2001), Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (2003), A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (2005), The Man Who Loved China (2008), Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers (2015), and, most recently, The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind (2025).
"Simon will be much missed," said Harper Group publisher and president Jonathan Burnham. "He was a mesmerizing raconteur, a polymath, a travel writer, an intrepid war correspondent, a prolific journalist and a man of incredible energy and charm and inspired enormous loyalty from his publishing partners. His legacy will remain through the remarkable list of non-fiction bestsellers which we're so proud to publish."
