Nicholas Evans, the British novelist whose literary debut, The Horse Whisperer, became a publishing phenomenon, selling more than 15 million copies and leading to a hit movie adaptation by Robert Redford, has died aged 72.
A mild-mannered former journalist and television producer, Evans was working as a screenwriter and trying to break into filmmaking when he heard a story that “made me shiver”, as he later told it. Visiting a friend in southwestern England in 1993, he met a blacksmith who told him about a “horse whisperer”, an almost mystical figure who could heal a traumatised pony by uttering a few gentle words.
