Simon Winchester went everywhere, wrote about everything

If curiosity provoked his many expeditions, his enormous capacity for facts and anecdotes and the ability to synthesise them so that a larger idea may be illuminated is what made him one of the most popular storytellers of his time.

Correspondence with Morris encouraged Winchester, who died this week at 82, to abandon a budding career as a geologist and take up the “world’s best job” as a journalist.

2 min readNov 6, 2026 06:20 AM IST First published on: Nov 6, 2026 at 06:20 AM IST

It wouldn’t be too much to describe Simon Winchester’s first encounter with the world of journalism as constituting a Damascene conversion. In a 1997 interview to The Independent, the writer described feeling like Paul on the road to Damascus when he read Coronation Everest by Jan (then James) Morris, a reporter for The Times who was stationed 25,000 ft up the mountainside in order to break the news of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summiting the world’s tallest peak.

Correspondence with Morris encouraged Winchester, who died this week at 82, to abandon a budding career as a geologist and take up the “world’s best job” as a journalist. His early years reporting on the Troubles in Northern Ireland for The Guardian led to his first book, In Holy Terror, but he established his name as one of the most erudite and entertaining writers of non-fiction with The Surgeon of Crowthorne, about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.

He went everywhere, from the Nixon White House to the violently splintering Balkans, from the Yangtze in China to Equatorial Guinea where he “lived on bananas and stewed rats”. He wrote about everything, from histories of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to the story of William Smith, the father of modern geology. If curiosity provoked his many expeditions, Winchester’s enormous capacity for facts and anecdotes and the ability to synthesise them so that a larger idea may be illuminated is what made him one of the most compelling storytellers of his time.