Early Life and Education
Simon Winchester was born in the autumn of 1944 in northern London. Winchester attended several boarding schools in Dorset. He spent a year hitchhiking around the United States, then in 1963 went up to St Catherine's College, Oxford to study geology. He graduated in 1966 with a degree in geology and found work with Falconbridge of Africa, a Canadian mining company. His first assignment was to work as a field geologist searching for copper deposits in Uganda.
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