Саймон Винчестер: Жизнь и творчество британского журналиста и историка.

British journalist and popular historian

Simon Winchester (born 28 September 1944) is a British American author and journalist. In his career at The Guardian newspaper, Winchester covered numerous significant events, including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. Winchester has written or contributed to over 30 nonfiction books, has written one novel, and has contributed to several magazines, among them Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic.

Born in London, Winchester attended several boarding schools in Dorset, including Hardye's School. He spent a year hitchhiking around the United States, then in 1963 went up to St Catherine's College, Oxford, to study geology. He graduated in 1966, and found work with Falconbridge of Africa, a Canadian mining company. His first assignment was to work as a field geologist searching for copper deposits in Uganda.

While on assignment in Uganda, Winchester happened upon a copy of James Morris' Coronation Everest, an account of the 1953 expedition that led to the first successful ascent of Mount Everest. The book instilled in Winchester the desire to be a writer, so he wrote to Morris, seeking career advice. Morris urged Winchester to give up geology the very day he received the letter, and get a job as a writer on a newspaper. In 1969 Winchester joined The Guardian, first as a regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but later as its Northern Ireland correspondent. In 1971, Winchester became involved in a controversy over the British press's coverage of Northern Ireland on the floor of the House of Commons when Bernadette Devlin described his role in reporting the shooting to death by British soldiers of Barney Watt in Hooker Street in the morning of Saturday, 6 February 1971. After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming correspondent for The Guardian in Washington, DC, where he covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency. He wrote about this event in his book, Prison Diary, published in 1983 and also in Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire, published in 1985 as well as Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories published in 2010, in which he tells of meeting up with one of his jailers many years later. In 1985, he shifted to working as a freelance writer and travelled to Hong Kong. Over the following fifteen years he contributed to a number of travel publications including Traveler, National Geographic and Smithsonian magazine. Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman (1998) published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller. Though he still writes travel books, Winchester has 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. 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.

On 4 July 2011 Winchester was naturalized as an American citizen in a ceremony aboard the USS Constitution.

TitleYearISBNPublisherSubject matterInterviews and presentationsCommentsIn Holy Terror: Reporting the Ulster Troubles1974Faber & FaberThe Troubles American Heartbeat: Notes From a Midwest Journey1976Faber & FaberMidwestern United States Their Noble Lordships: Class and Power in Modern Britain1982Random HouseSocial class in the United Kingdom, British nobility Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj1983Oxford University PressBritish colonial architecture in India Text by Jan Morris; photographs by WinchesterPrison Diary: Argentina1983Chatto & Windus Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire1985Hodder & StoughtonBritish Overseas Territories Also published under the title The Sun Never Sets. Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles1988HarperCollinsSouth Korea Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Culture1991Simon & Schuster Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons1992Stewart Tabori & ChangHong Kong By Rich Browne, James Marshall and Simon Winchester. Pacific Nightmare: How Japan Starts World War III : A Future History1992Birch Lane Press FictionSmall World: A Global Photographic Project, 1987–941995Dewi Lewis Publishing Written with Martin Parr. The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time1996PicadorYangtze River The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words1998Viking PressWilliam Chester Minor, Sir James Murray, Oxford English DictionaryBooknotes interview with Winchester on The Professor and the Madman, November 8, 1998, C SPANPublished in the United States as The Professor and the Madman The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans1999HarperCollinsBreakup of Yugoslavia, Yugoslav WarsPresentation by Winchester on The Fracture Zone, October 31, 1999, C SPANThe Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology2001HarperCollinsWilliam SmithPresentation by Winchester on The Map That Changed the World, September 7, 2001, C SPANInterview about The Map That Changed the World by Powell's Books, 10 October 2006 The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary2003Oxford University PressOxford English DictionaryPresentation by Winchester on The Meaning of Everything, November 20, 2003, C SPANKrakatoa: The Day the World Exploded2003HarperCollins1883 eruption of KrakatoaPresentation by Winchester on Krakatoa, April 10, 2003, C SPANSimon Winchester's Calcutta2004Lonely PlanetCalcutta, India A collection of writings about the Indian city, edited with his son Rupert Winchester. A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 19062005HarperCollins1906 San Francisco earthquakePresentation by Winchester on A Crack in the Edge of the World, October 21, 2005, C SPANThe Bat Segundo Show interview with Winchester on A Crack in the Edge of the World, December 28, 2006The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom2008HarperCollinsJoseph NeedhamPresentation by Winchester on The Man Who Loved China, May 20, 2008, C SPANInterview about Bomb, Book & Compass – The Life of Joseph Needham (transcript) by Ramona Koval, The Book Show, ABC Radio National, 3 October 2008Title of the UK edition: Bomb, Book & Compass. Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories2010HarperCollinsHistory of the Atlantic OceanPresentation by Winchester on Atlantic, November 4, 2010, C SPANPresentation by Winchester on Atlantic, November 21, 2010, C SPAN Interview about The Atlantic by Claudia Cragg, KGNU radio, 2 December 2010Q&A interview with Winchester on Atlantic, November 27, 2011, C SPANAlso published under the title Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean. The Alice Behind Wonderland2011Oxford University PressAlice Liddell The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible2013HarperCollins Presentation by Winchester on The Men Who United the States, October 18, 2013, C SPANThe Bat Segundo Show interview with Winchester on The Men Who United the States, November 26, 2013The Man with the Electrified Brain2013Byliner When the Earth Shakes: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis2015Viking Books for Young ReadersEarthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers2015HarperCollinsHistory of the Pacific OceanPresentation by Winchester on Pacific, October 29, 2015, C SPANThe Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World2018HarperCollinsPrecision engineeringInterview with Winchester on The Perfectionists, November 17, 2018, C SPANAlso published as Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World2021HarperCollinsLand tenureInterview with Winchester on Land, February 17, 2021, C SPANKnowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic2023HarperCollinsKnowledge, Information Systems

Winchester was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for "services to journalism and literature" in Queen Elizabeth II's New Year Honours list of 2006. Winchester was named an honorary fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford in October 2009. Winchester received an honorary degree from Dalhousie University in October 2010. Winchester received the Lawrence J. Burpee Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society in November 2016. He was also elected a Fellow of the RCGS.