I decided to be a writer when I was about eight. I was convinced that grown-ups could not understand the experience of childhood and that it was up to me to put them right before it was too late. I estimated that by twelve it would be too late. I never wrote the child’s book of childhood, but the sense that fleeting life needed to be apprehended in writing, and that its business was empathy, never left me.
Early procrastination continued. As the son of worker in a lightbulb factory in north London, there were no writers in my life. My secret ambition was ridiculous, and best never mentioned. There was, instead, a first degree in Food Science in the UK, then a MS in Agricultural Economics in the US. After spells in Mexico and a London pub, my first serious job was teaching at Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria. I hadn’t applied for it; the Nigerian government sent me a contract out of the blue for reasons never to be explained. It changed my life. First it led to a PhD, based on research in Nigerian villages, and, later, a first novel, Horizontal Hotel, based on research conducted after dark.
I still had not met another writer when Horizontal Hotel was accepted by the best editor in London, Diana Athill at Andre Deutsch. A writing career, it seemed, would be easy. I gave up my UK university post to pursue it. It was never easy again.
For the next decade I was busy. There was a second novel, Written on a Stranger’s Map, and a widely-noticed story in Granta, The Development Game, (written as Leonard Frank). In between writing, I travelled on assignments for UN agencies and Oxfam. Twenty countries in total, firstly African, then mainly Asia. Assignments varied from resettling guerillas in Zimbawe, to de-collectivization in Inner Mongolia, China.
After another inexplicable offer out of the blue, to teach in an MFA program, I moved to America with the intention of concentrating exclusively on my writing. Sea Level had been bought by a big New York publisher while still in progress, and it seemed time to make the move. But as it turned out, by the time Sea Level was published, I was in a remote New Mexico village, unable to stand. I was disabled with ME disease, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, as the result of a viral infection. Overnight, my life was divided into before and after, fast and slow.
It was ten years until my next novel, A Girl From Zanzibar, which won the Northern California Book Award and was optioned for a feature film. Another ten years past before Love and Fatigue in America, an autobiographical novel about my health, and America’s. Man Picks Flower is arriving after another long delay. Though produced too slowly, the books were well received with excellent reviews including the NYT, the New Yorker, London’s TLS, and starred reviews from the early review services.
With improving health, the pace of life picked up again in recent years. I have made documentary films with indigenous peoples in India, and have two new novels underway, as well as optimistic film and TV projects. I have depended very much on artist residencies, and am grateful for the many fellowships from MacDowell and VCCA in particular, and others from Yaddo, Willapa Bay, Ucross, La Napoule in France, and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Dips into academic life include the MFA Writing Programs of San Francisco State, Eastern Washington University, and Warren Wilson, as well as being Copeland Fellow in International Development at Amherst College.
I am still the eight-year-old child, who believed that the value and truth of life was to be found in the empathy of writing. And still struggling to find new ways to get it right. More at: www.rogerking.org
