Francis Henry King (4 March 19233 July 2011) was a British novelist 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
King was born on 4 March 1923 in Adelboden, Switzerland, to a father in the Indian Civil Service, brought up in British 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 the Second World War he was a conscientious objector and left Oxford to work on the land.
After completing his degree in 1949, King worked for the British Council. His positions with them took him to Italy, Salonika, and finally Kyoto. While 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 then he had already published nine novels, as well as poetry and a memoir.
Literary career
He won the Somerset Maugham Award for his novel The Dividing Stream (1951). 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.
King's gay-themed 1969 novel, A Domestic Animal, was longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010, and invited a threat of libel action by former Labour Party MP Tom Skeffington-Lodge.