14 Facts About Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester was born on 28 September 1944 and is a British-American author and journalist.

Simon Winchester has written or contributed to over 30 best-selling nonfiction books, one novel, and several magazines, among them Conde Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic.

Simon Winchester spent a year hitchhiking around the United States, then in 1963 went up to St Catherine's College, Oxford, to study geology.

Simon Winchester graduated in 1966, and found work with Falconbridge of Africa, a Canadian mining company.

Morris urged Simon Winchester to give up geology the very day he received the letter, and get a job as a writer on a newspaper.

In 1969 Simon Winchester joined The Guardian, first as a regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but later as its Northern Ireland correspondent.

In 1971, Simon 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.

In 1982, while working as chief foreign feature writer for The Sunday Times, Simon Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentine forces.

Simon Winchester wrote about this event in his book, Prison Diary, published in 1983 and 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.

When Conde Nast re-branded Signature magazine as Conde Nast Traveler, Simon Winchester was appointed its Asia-Pacific Editor.

Simon Winchester then published A Crack in the Edge of the World, a book about San Francisco's 1906 earthquake.

Simon Winchester pretended that his boat had run into trouble next to the island, and remained in the bay for about two days.

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

Simon Winchester is the founder, editor and reporter of the Sandisfield Times, a hyper-local newspaper focused on issues in the small Berkshires town.