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.