Christina Koning

Life Koning was born in Kuala Belait, Borneo in 1954, 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. and was short-listed for the David Higham Prize for Fiction. 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, 2000) 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 work The Dark Tower (Arbuthnot, 2010).

Recent novels include Variable Stars (Arbuthnot, 2011), about the 18th-century astronomer Caroline Herschel and Line of Sight (Arbuthnot, 2014), the first in a series of detective stories set during the 1920s in the aftermath of the First World War. Game of Chance (Arbuthnot, 2015), set in 1929, continues the Blind Detective series, and is followed by Time of Flight (Arbuthnot, 2016), Out of Shot (Arbuthnot, 2017), End of Term (Arbuthnot, 2018), and Murder in Berlin (Allison & Busby, 2023).

Koning has two children, and lives in Cambridge.