Simon Winchester, author of ‘The Professor and the Madman,’ has died

The Boston Globe · Alan Cowell · 2026-11-06 05:25 UTC

His peripatetic resume included assignments covering Northern Ireland's Troubles and Watergate-era Washington.

Simon Winchester, a British-American journalist, author, and broadcaster, who traded an early career as a geologist exploring East Africa for an even more peripatetic resume covering stories from Northern Ireland’s bloodstained Troubles to Watergate-era Washington, the Falklands war, and China, died on Tuesday on his farm in Sandisfield, in the Berkshires, according to his wife, Setsuko Sato. He was 82.

The cause of death was a heart attack, she said.

His reporting days were studded with adventure and peril. During the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands and Britain’s reconquest of the remote Atlantic territory in 1982, he achieved twin distinctions of being on the islands when they were first occupied, then being arrested in southern Patagonia, mistaken for a spy, and imprisoned for three months, according to a biography on his website.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe · All coverage of this story