Francis King Obituaries

Francis King, photo and signature from the British Council Corfu visitors' book kept by Marie Aspioti.

Another great writer with strong Greek connections has died.

Francis King died, aged 88, on July 3, 2011.

The Guardian

The Telegraph

One of his first novels was set in Corfu (The Dark Glasses), and a collection of short stories (So Hurt and Humiliated and other stories) featured several stories set in Thessaloniki. He also wrote several poems about Salonika:

   "But still the bay
Waits wide and tranquil at the end of every turning,
    Beautiful today, tomorrow and another day"

("Salonika" from Rod of Incantation, 1952.

The dark glasses.

Obituary (British Council)

 The British Council regrets the death on 3 July 2011 of Francis Henry King OBE and CBE, who joined in 1949 and worked in Florence, Salonika, Athens, Alexandria, Finland and Kyoto, he left in 1964.

He was a past winner of the W. Somerset Maugham Prize for his novel The Dividing Stream(1951) and also won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize. His 1956 book The firewalkers was published under the pseudonym Frank Cauldwell.

A President Emeritus of International PEN and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he was appointed an Officer (OBE) of the Order of the British Empire in 1979 and a Commander of the Order (CBE) in 1985.

Strange, this posting received 8693 page hits...