Nicholas Evans

Nicholas Benbow Evans (26 July 1950 – 9 August 2022) was a British journalist, screenwriter, television and film producer and novelist. He was best known for his 1995 debut novel, The Horse Whisperer. It has sold over fifteen million copies, and has been adapted into a film.

Biography Nicholas Benbow Evans was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, son of Anthony Evans, director of a motor engineering company, and Eileen, née Whitehouse. He was educated at Bromsgrove School, where he was head boy. He served as a teacher in Senegal with the charity Voluntary Service Overseas for a year, after which he earned a first in law at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. Following graduation he worked as a reporter for the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Evening Chronicle before moving to London Weekend Television where he worked on Weekend World and The London Programme and was executive producer of The South Bank Show from 1982 to 1984. But during this time, he heard from a friend a "story that made me shiver": a "horse whisperer" in southwest England who could heal and soothe horses. £60,000 in debt, he decided to write the story as a novel as opposed to a screenplay, having felt burned by his previous attempts to mount his own film. In the course of research, he travelled to the U.S. states of Montana, New Mexico, and California. The rights for his novel were sold by his agent and friend Caradoc King for US$3 million at the 1994 Frankfurt Book Fair. In the UK, The Horse Whisperer was listed at 195 on the BBC's Big Read, a 2003 survey with the goal of finding the "nation's best-loved book". It was made into a film in 1998; Robert Redford directed, and he starred opposite Kristin Scott Thomas, along with Scarlett Johansson and Sam Neill.

Personal life and death Evans married Oxford classmate Jenny Lyon in 1973; they had two children and divorced in the 1990s. and Evans underwent a transplant in 2011 using a kidney donated by his daughter.

Evans died from a heart attack at his home in London on 9 August 2022, aged 72.

Works The Horse Whisperer (1995) The Loop (1998) The Smoke Jumper (2001) The Divide (2005) The Brave (2010)