Francis King
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Francis Henry King (born 1923) is a British novelist and short story writer, and a poet.

He was born in Adelboden, Switzerland and brought up in India. 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; he was posted around Europe, and then in Kyoto. He resigned to write full time in 1964.

He came out as a homosexual in the 1970s; in Yesterday Came Suddenly (1993), after his longterm partner had died from AIDS in 1988, he described the relationship. He suffered a stroke in 2005.

He is a past winner of the W. Somerset Maugham Prize for his novel The Dividing Stream (1951) and has also won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize. A President Emeritus of International PEN and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a recipient of the honour Commander of the British Empire, awarded by Queen Elizabeth II.

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) as Frank Caudwell
• 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 with John Haylock
• The Brighton Belle and other stories (1968)
• The Domestic Animal (1970) novel
• 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)
• Visiting Cards (1990)
• Punishments (1989)
• The Ant Colony (1992)
• Yesterday Came Suddenly (1993) autobiography
• The Nick of Time (2002) (novel)
• The Sunlight on the Garden (2006) (short stories)
• With My Little Eye (2007) (novel)

References

• Friends and Friendship (1974) Kay Dick