Ross King (born July 16, 1962) is a Canadian novelist and non-fiction writer. He began his career by writing two works of historical fiction in the 1990s, later turning to non-fiction, and has since written several critically acclaimed and best-selling historical works.
Career and works
King was born in
Estevan, Saskatchewan, Canada and was raised in the nearby village of
North Portal. He received his undergraduate university education at the
University of Regina, where in 1984 he completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in English Literature. Continuing his studies at the University of Regina, he received a Master of Arts degree in 1986 upon completing a thesis on the poet
T. S. Eliot. Later he achieved a PhD from
York University in Toronto (1992), where he specialized in eighteenth-century English literature.
King moved to England to take up a position as a post-doctoral research fellow at
University College London. It was at this time that he began writing his first novel.
King's first novel, Domino, (1995), tells the story of a castrato singer seen through the experience of an aspiring painter in the London of the 1770s.
In 1998, King published Ex-Libris, his second work of historical fiction. Set in London and Prague, it chronicles how a London bookseller's search in the 1660s for a missing manuscript leads him unwittingly into a world of deception and murder.
Brunelleschi's Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral in Florence (2000) describes how the Italian architect
Filippo Brunelleschi designed what still stands as the largest masonry dome ever built: the dome of the cathedral of
Santa Maria del Fiore, completed in 1436. Brunelleschi's Dome marked King's transition from novelist to writer of art histories and biographies.[1]Brunelleschi's Dome was on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle, and was the recipient of several awards including the 2000 Book Sense Nonfiction Book of the Year.
Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, (2002), follows the four arduous years during which
Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel amid the political and religious intrigues of early sixteenth-century Rome. For Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, King was nominated in 2003 for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
King's next book, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (2006), was met by much critical acclaim and considerable commercial success. By contrasting the works and lives of the French painters
Ernest Meissonier and
Édouard Manet, the book chronicles the dramatic transition by which the
Impressionist painters changed the artistic vision of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. King received Canada's 2006
Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction for this book.[1]
His next project, part of the
Eminent Lives series, was Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power (2007), a biography of
Niccolò Machiavelli in which King illustrates the personal, social and political development of one of history's most famous political theorists.
Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven (2010) looked at the
Group of Seven organization of Canadian landscape artists that launched Canada's first nationalist art movement in the decades after the First World War.[1]