English writer Nicholas Evans, the author of the bestselling The Horse Whisperer, has died at 72 after suffering a heart attack, his agency announced on Monday.
A statement released this Monday noted that Evans was also known for his work as a journalist and television writer. He died suddenly from heart failure the previous Tuesday.
Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England, Evans rose to fame in 1995 with his novel The Horse Whisperer, a work that topped the sales charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
The success of this book led American actor Robert Redford to direct a 1998 film adaptation of the same name, featuring Kristin Scott Thomas, Scarlett Johansson and Sam Neill in key roles.
That novel was followed by Land of the Wolves in 1998, Through the Fire in 1999, When the Abyss Parted in 2005, and The Man Who Wanted to Be Brave in 2010.
Evans began his professional career as a newspaper reporter in the late 1970s for the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle upon Tyne, a path that later expanded into television work.
In this arena he focused on American politics and foreign relations, a specialization that led him to cover the war in Lebanon before turning to fiction with The Horse Whisperer.
His experiences in Beirut and in international politics informed his later work The Man Who Wants to Be Brave, as Evans discussed in a 2011 interview with Efe, exploring family secrets and the human cost of war.
It took Evans several years to finish this book after a turbulent episode in 2008 when he and his singer‑songwriter wife Charlotte Gordon Cumming, along with his brother‑in‑law Alastair, encountered a dangerous situation at a cottage in Scotland involving poisonous mushrooms.
The author described the incident and the effects of the mushrooms the following morning, noting the illness that followed and the subsequent medical attention required to recover his health.
Evans and his wife later faced further health challenges, culminating in a kidney transplant in 2011 that helped restore his quality of life and allowed him to continue writing and contributing to public discourse on politics, culture, and human resilience.