Christina Koning

Christina Koning is an award-winning novelist, journalist and academic.

She was born in Kuala Belait, Borneo, and spent her early childhood in Venezuela and Jamaica. After coming to England, she was educated at Girton College, Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh – the setting for her first novel.

She has worked extensively as a travel writer and literary critic – notably as Books Editor for The Times and Cosmopolitan, and on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour - and is currently a judge for the Society of Authors' McKitterick Prize.

As an academic, she has taught Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and University of London, and was the 2014-15 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. She now teaches at Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education at Madingley Hall.

Koning's first novel, A Mild Suicide (Lime Tree) is set in Edinburgh in 1977 and was short-listed for the David Higham Prize for Fiction. Her second novel Undiscovered Country (Penguin) won the Encore Award and contended for the Orange Prize for Fiction. That novel explores aspects of colonialism, an awareness from her early childhood in Venezuela. Fabulous Time (Viking) is another novel with colonial themes and is partly set in China during the Xinhai_Revolution (1911 revolution). It won the Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship. The Anglo-Zulu War in South Africa (1879) is the setting for her workThe Dark Tower (Arbuthnot, 2010).

Recent novels include Variable Stars (Arbuthnot) and Line of Sight (Arbuthnot). Line of Sight is the first in a series of detective stories set during the 1920s in the aftermath of the First World War, continued in 2015 with Game of Chance and Time of Flight.

Koning has two children, and lives in Cambridge.