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While working for The Guardian he covered several major events, such as the Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland in 1972 in which British Army soldiers fired on protesters and bystanders, resulting in the deaths of 14 people, and the Watergate scandal in the US that ended with the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.

While working as a journalist, he began writing books on geography, history, politics, travel and other areas.

His first book, In Holy Terror, published in 1975, documents his experiences during the ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland.

When his book The Professor and the Madman, about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, was published in 1998, it made it to The New York Times best-seller list.

Winchester employed the same narrative nonfiction form he used in The Professor and the Madman in his travel writing, and has produced several best-sellers, such as The Map that Changed the World, which explored the work of geologist William Smith.

He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2006, in recognition of his services to journalism and literature.

In 1982, when he worked as chief foreign feature writer for The Sunday Times, he was held in prison in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, for about three months when the Falkland Islands were invaded by Argentine forces. "Every experience counts," he says. His third book, Prison Diary, recounts his time in custody.

His best-known book among Chinese people is probably The Man Who Loved China, published in 2008, about the life of Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham, who helped project China to the Western world.