Bill Bryson stayed in Britain after a job at a Surrey psychiatric hospital
In 1973 a young Iowan backpacking through Europe took a job at a psychiatric hospital in Surrey and decided to stick around. There he met a nurse, Cynthia Billen, and married her. Decades later Bill Bryson would be voted the author whose book best captured British identity, and he eventually passed the citizenship test himself.
Bryson grew up in Des Moines, where both parents worked for the Des Moines Register: his father as a sports writer for half a century, his mother as home furnishings editor. He left Drake University in 1972 to wander Europe for four months and went back the next year with a school friend who would later appear in his books under the pseudonym Stephen Katz. Those journeys fed Neither Here nor There.
After a brief return to Iowa to finish his degree, the couple settled in Britain in 1977. Bryson worked as a journalist, starting at the Bournemouth Evening Echo and later editing business pages at The Times and The Independent. His 1995 tour of the country, Notes from a Small Island, became a favourite; in a 2003 World Book Day vote, British readers chose it as the book that best summed up their nation.
From 1995 to 2003 the family lived in Hanover, New Hampshire. Bryson wrote a newspaper column about readjusting to American life, later gathered into a book, and hiked stretches of the Appalachian Trail with Katz, producing A Walk in the Woods. In the 2015 film version Robert Redford played Bryson. The 2003 bestseller A Short History of Nearly Everything took him deep into science, and his hometown later gave him the key to the city and a day in his honour.
Bryson served as chancellor of Durham University from 2005 to 2011. For years he joked that he was too cowardly to sit the British citizenship test, but he finally took it in Eastleigh and became a dual citizen in 2014. He has sold more than 16 million books and retired from writing them in October 2020.
Source: Bill Bryson
