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Francis Henry King, CBE (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.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Francis King", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0