Francis King’s biography, net worth, fact, career, awards and life story

Francis Henry King CBE (4 March 1923 – 3 July 2011) was a British novelist, poet and short story writer. He worked for the British Council for 15 years, with positions in Europe and Japan. For 25 years he was a chief book reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph, and for 10 years its theatre critic.

Early life and Council career

He was born on 4 March 1923 in Adelboden, Switzerland, to a father in the civil service, brought up in India and sent back to England when his father was dying. As a boy, he was shunted around among aunts and uncles.

He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford. During World War II he was a conscientious objector, and left Oxford to work on the land.

After completing his degree in 1949, he worked for the British Council. His positions with them took him to Italy, Salonika and finally Kyoto. Whilst he was in Greece he met the uninhibited writer Anne Cumming who was also working for the British Council. She enjoyed observing his homosexual adventures. In 1964 he resigned to write full-time, by when he had already published nine novels, as well as poetry and a memoir.

Literary career

He won the W. Somerset Maugham Prize for his novel The Dividing Stream (1951) and also won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize. In 2000, he was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for “a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature”.

His 1956 book The Firewalkers was published pseudonymously under the name Frank Cauldwell.

From 1986 to 1989 he was President of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers and oldest human rights organisation. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was appointed an Officer (OBE) of the Order of the British Empire in 1979 and a Commander of the Order (CBE) in 1985. In 2003, his novel The Nick of Time was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Personal life

King came out as homosexual in the 1970s. After his long-term partner had died from AIDS in 1988, he described their relationship in Yesterday Came Suddenly (1993). King suffered a stroke in 2005.

Death

Francis King died on 3 July 2011 at the age of 88.

Works

• To the Dark Tower (1946) novel
• Never Again (1948) novel
• An Air That Kills (1948) novel
• The Dividing Stream (1951) novel, 1952 Somerset Maugham Award
• Rod of Incantation (1952) poems
• The Dark Glasses (1954) novel
• The Firewalkers: a Memoir (1956) (wrote under the name Frank Cauldwell)
• The Man on the Rock (1957) novel
• The Widow (1957) novel
• The Custom House (1961) novel
• The Japanese Umbrella and Other Stories (1964) – short stories
• The Last Pleasure Gardens (1965)
• The Waves Behind the Boat (1967) novel
• Robert de Montesquiou by Philippe Julian (1967) – translator, along with John Haylock
• The Brighton Belle and other stories (1968)
• The Domestic Animal (1970) novel (revised version of the suppressed 1969 edition)
• Flights (1973)
• A Game of Patience (1974)
• The Needle (1975)
• E.M. Forster and his World (1978) – a biography of the author of A Passage to India and Howards End
• Act of Darkness (1983)
• Voices in an Empty Room (1984)
• Frozen Music (1987)
• Visiting Cards (1990)
• Punishments (1989)
• The Ant Colony (1992)
• Yesterday Came Suddenly (1993) – autobiography
• Ash on an old man’s sleeve’ (1996) – novel
• The Nick of Time (2002) novel
• The Sunlight on the Garden (2006) – short stories
• With My Little Eye (2007) novel
• Cold Snap (2009)

Resurgence

In 2008 Valancourt Books, a speciality small press, began reprinting many of Francis King’s works. As of 2014 six of his titles have been reprinted:

• An Air That Kills (1948), with a new introduction by the Author
• The Dark Glasses (1954), with a new introduction by Jonathan Fryer
• The Dividing Stream (1951), with a new introduction by Paul Binding
• Never Again (1948), with a new introduction by Robert Khan
• To the Dark Tower (1946), with a new introduction by Gregory Woods
• The Man on the Rock (1957), with a new introduction by Gregory Woods