Simon Winchester, Author of 'The Professor and the Madman,' Has Died

Simon Winchester, a British-American journalist, broadcaster and prolific author, died of a heart attack at 82 on his Massachusetts farm. Trained as a geologist at Oxford, he was working for a mining company in Uganda when a book about Everest reporter Jan Morris inspired him to pursue journalism. He joined The Guardian in 1969 and covered Northern Ireland during the Troubles, later reporting from Washington during the Watergate era, the Falklands conflict and China. His career brought danger as well as access: he was on the Falkland Islands during Argentina’s 1982 invasion and spent three months imprisoned in Patagonia after being mistaken for a spy.

Winchester later admitted that, while reporting from Northern Ireland, he had repeated claims supplied by British Army intelligence that civilian victims were IRA combatants. He came to believe much of that information was unreliable and said his broadcasts had briefly made him a vehicle for the army’s message. His first book drew on his Northern Ireland reporting, but his major success was The Professor and the Madman, a 1998 account of the Oxford English Dictionary’s editor and a contributor confined to an asylum for the criminally insane. The bestseller became a 2019 film. He wrote or contributed to about 30 books, ranging across language, geology, history and natural phenomena; his final book examined wind. Born in London, he became a U.S. citizen in 2011. He is survived by his wife, Setsuko Sato, and three sons.