Biography

Roger King was born in Enfield, an outer northern suburb of London. The first member of his family to attend college, he studied at the University of Nottingham in England and then gained an MS in Agricultural Economics from the University of Massachusetts in America. During a vague period that included living in a Mexican village and working in a London pub, he was invited to teach at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, which began his involvement with Africa and rural poverty. He received a PhD from the University of Reading in England, where he was on the faculty until resigning to devote more time to fiction. His first African novel, Horizontal Hotel, was published in 1983, followed by Written on a Stranger's Map in 1987. While writing novels he continued to spend much of his time traveling and working in Africa and Asia, usually for UN agencies. In 1990, he was invited to teach creative writing at Eastern Washington University, and moved to the United States. Sea Level was completed in 1991 and is mainly set in Asia. Later that year life was abruptly slowed by the sudden onset of a chronic illness - ME Disease. During irregular remissions, he was on the creative writing faculty at San Francisco State University, the University of New Mexico and the Warren Wilson MFA Program, and has consulted for the United Nations and the World Bank. Since 1997 he has lived and written in Leverett, western Massachusetts. A Girl From Zanzibar was published in 2002. His newly completed book is titled Love and Fatigue in America. He claims that the only useful treatment for MEDisease he has discovered is being on a sailing boat on the ocean.

Distinctions

For 2010–2011: Copeland Fellow at Amherst College
BABRA (now NCBR) Award for Novel of the Year,for A Girl from Zanzibar.
Six time Fellow at The MacDowell Colony,
Six time Fellow at The Corporation of Yaddo,
Five time Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts,
Breadloaf Fellow,
Winner of the BBC/Writers Guild First Screenplay Award.