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 recoveries, he was on the creative writing faculty at San Francisco State University, and wrote A Girl From Zanzibar, which was published in 2002. Since 1997, he has lived and worked in Leverett, western Massachusetts. His new book has the provisional title, Love and Fatigue in America.