His account of the journey, On Foot to the Golden Horn, won the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize in 1993.

Subsequently, he wrote Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, which was featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review.

Later, he became popular as the author of a series of historical mystery novels beginning with The Janissary Tree, which pivot on the Ottoman investigator Yashim, a eunuch living in Istanbul during the 1830s-1840s.

In 2016 Goodwin published a cookbook, Yashim Cooks Istanbul, based on the detective series, which was selected by NPR's Book Concierge[3] as one of its Great Reads of the year.

Goodwin did not meet his birth father until 1992, at the age of 28,[6] and was raised by his mother's first husband, the film producer Richard B.