"I see the great continuities in New Zealand history as being decency and common sense and up until now when we've confronted these things we've been able to talk them through, and I'm sure we will with this issue as well." -- Michael King
Michael King, OBE (15 December 1945 – 30 March 2004) was a New Zealand popular historian, author and biographer. He wrote or edited over 30 books on New Zealand topics, including The Penguin History of New Zealand, which was the most popular New Zealand book of 2004.
"A huge change has taken place in my lifetime.""Big media companies have lots of money and content, but they have no way to tap into a good base of users.""If you have a little extra parking, I err on the side of getting rid of it in favor of having some more greenery.""It's definitely going to be harder than it sounds to acquire millions of users in the U.S. It's going to be a lot of work, and you can't make light of that.""When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British."
King was born in Wellington to Eleanor and Commander Lewis King, one of four children. Educated at Sacred Heart College in Auckland and St. Patrick's College, Silverstream, he went on to study history at Victoria University of Wellington before working as a journalist at the Waikato Times newspaper in Hamilton in 1968.
King earned degrees in history at Victoria, (BA 1967) and the University of Waikato (MA 1968), and gained his Ph.D. at Waikato (1978). In 1997 he received an honorary D.Litt. at Victoria. He was Visiting Professor of New Zealand Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and taught or held fellowships at six other universities.
Although not M?ori himself, King was well-known for his knowledge of M?ori culture and history. New Zealand Listener, one of New Zealand's most popular weekly magazines, dubbed King "the people's historian" for his efforts to write about and for the local populous. As a biographer, King published works on Te Puea Herangi, Whina Cooper, Frank Sargeson (1995) and Janet Frame (2000). As an historian, King's works include Being Pakeha (1985), Moriori (1989), and The Penguin History of New Zealand (July 2003), the latter of which was, by February 2004, into its seventh edition. In all, King wrote, co-wrote and edited more than 30 books on a diverse range of New Zealand topics. He contributed to all five volumes of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.
King was a diabetic and had post-polio syndrome. He received six weeks of chemotherapy and radiotherapy for throat cancer discovered in October 2003, which was in remission by 2004.
Following King's death, an essay on John Money was posthumously published in an exhibition catalogue for the Eastern Southland Gallery, located in the provincial town of Gore, New Zealand. King had planned to write a full biography on Money, but had lacked funding to do so in his lifetime.
He has two children, the filmmaker Jonathan King and novelist Rachael King.
King and his second wife Maria Jungowska were killed when their car crashed into a tree and caught fire near Maramarua, on State Highway 2 in the north Waikato. The cause of the crash was reported by the police at the time to be a complete mystery as speed was not a factor and investigators have little idea why the car would veer off a straight road. A Coroner's inquest into the deaths determined that the accident was most likely caused by driver inattention.
King was winner of the 2003 Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Non-Fiction. Throughout his career he won the Feltex Television Writers' Award (1980), Winston Churchill Fellowship (1980), Fulbright Visiting Writers' Fellowship (1988), Order of the British Empire (1988), NZ Literary Fund Award (1987 and 1989), Wattie Book Of The Year Award (1984 and 1990), NZ Book Award (1978) and was Burns Fellow at the University of Otago (1998-99). His book The Penguin History of New Zealand was overwhelmingly the Readers' Choice at the 2004 Montana NZ Book Awards. The New Zealand Herald named him New Zealander of the Year for 2003.
