Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester was born in London in 1944, studied geology at Oxford, and spent his career as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian before turning to books. His experience of Northern Ireland, Korea, and the Falklands gave him a journalist's instinct for the story behind the story, and his Oxford geology gave him an unusual framework for understanding landscape.

The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998, published in the US as The Professor and the Madman) was his breakthrough — the story of two men who were both contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of whom was confined in Broadmoor after murdering a man. It brought the Victorian intellectual world alive through individual biography.

The Map That Changed the World (2001) is about William Smith, the canal digger who produced the first geological map of England and Wales — a book about science and class and the way a single idea can transform how humans understand the earth.

Krakatoa (2003) is about the 1883 eruption — its geology, its global impact, and the political aftermath (the first major volcanic eruption to be covered in real time by the newly installed telegraph network). The Pacific (2015) is a geopolitical geography of the world's largest ocean.

His books work because they take seriously the idea that history and science and geography are inseparable — that you cannot understand a place without understanding how it was formed, and you cannot understand an idea without understanding the landscape in which it emerged.