Simon Winchester.....

   Simon Winchester most famous book began its journey in his bathtub. He was reading a book on dictionaries,when he chanced upon a footnote on Dr. W.C. Minor, the American madman who helped put together the Oxford English Dictionary. That eureka! moment culminated in The Professor and the Madman. "I sat bolt up-right in the bath like Archimedes," he said to a delighted audience on the first day of the Jaipur literature Festival. He had a telephone near the bath, and a lexicographer friend he thought he could tap for more on Minor. "So I reached over with  dripping hands and called," That phone call unfurled a fascinating story of the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, the mad murderer who contributed to it from the inside of an asylum.

  The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of  Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, who first run of 10,000 copies sold rapidly, took everyone by surprise. "My editor was as astonished as I was by the success [of the book], "he later told during an interview. That the reading public would care for a historical account of a dictionary writing exercise was genuinely surprising. Winchester's astute editor later broke down the constituent parts. "Its about an unknown person who made a major contribution to human society, the trajectory of his life was dramatically up and dramatically down, and there was an act of a grotesque bodily, mutilation in the story [Minor cut off his penis], "says Winchester, Do you, he asked, know anybody else who fits."

  In fact, he did. Winchester's  second book too managed to gather some of the same"magic ingredients". As a geologist by training, he'd heard of William Smith who drew the world-changing geological map. "His map was plagiarised, he went bankrupt, was sent to a debtors' prison, his wife went mad and became a nymphomaniac," adds Winchester. "That word -nymphomaniac - that was the 'aha moment'. It was something so unexpected."

  Since then Winchester has trotted out an astonishing range of books, from an ambitious biography of the Pacific ocean to an account of how America was welded together to form the United states, to a  narration of one of the world's most disruptive volcanic explosions, aptly titled Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883.

  "My father used to criticise me in a congenial way, saying that i had the mind of a grasshopper,  "he says of his dizzying array of interests. "I get fascinated by one subject and move on to another. I,m afraid that's probably what happened here." After quitting geology, Winchester took to  newspaper reporting and travel writing. His non-fiction carefully gleans forgotten character and events. The key to good non-fiction is three-fold, he say. "First of all, you got to have the idea, It's got to be a good idea. The second thing would have to be good writing. But I think that's not the second most important thing. I think the second most important thing is the structure of the book. The third is good writing.

Interestingly, the seed of Winchester's next book came from a suggestion made by a reader- a history of precision- and will be out in 2018. The British-born author became an American citizen in 2011,after years of living there and loving it.