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Evans’ literary agency said that the author and screenwriter died last Tuesday: “United Agents are very sad to announce the sudden death of the celebrated best-selling author Nicholas Evans … following a heart attack, aged 72.”
Published in 1995, The Horse Whisperer tells of a complex and talented trainer who is hired to help an injured teenager and her horse back to health 95, after severe injury. The story was adapted for cinema in 1998 by Redford.
He also played the title character, with Scarlett Johansson as young rider Grace MacLean in her breakout role at 14.
Born in 1950 in Worcestershire, Evans attended Bromsgrove School then read law at Oxford University.
In the 1970s he was a journalist on the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle before he moved into broadcasting media.
He specialised in US politics and foreign affairs and spent time covering the civil war in Beirut. By the 1980s he was at London Weekend Television, producing films on Sir Laurence Olivier, Francis Bacon and David Hockney for The South Bank Show.
After developing his screenwriting in projects starring Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Sir Ian Holm he began work on The Horse Whisperer.
Evans also wrote The Loop (1998), The Smoke Jumper (1999), The Divide (2005) and The Brave (2009).
Charlie King, the managing director of Little, Brown Book Group, said yesterday: “Nicholas Evans was a masterful storyteller and one of the most successful, best-loved novelists of his generation.
“His era-defining bestseller, The Horse Whisperer, and his four subsequent novels have been enjoyed by millions of readers around the world. He will be greatly missed.”
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