King, Ross (1962-)

Born July 16, 1962, and raised in North Portal, Saskatchewan, Ross King is a best-selling author of both fiction and non-fiction. The second of seven children, King attended school in Bienfait and Estevan, before moving on to the University of Regina to study English literature. Completing an MA in 1986, King moved to Toronto to pursue a PhD at York University. He completed it in 1992, and moved to England to take on a research fellowship at London’s University College.

In 1993, as his research fellowship was drawing near its end, King decided to write a novel based on his post-doctoral research into the 18th century. He sent the first few chapters of the manuscript of Domino to several publishers, and was offered a contract by London-based editor Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson under his imprint at Reed Books. Domino was published in the United Kingdom in 1995, appearing in Canada shortly thereafter.

King’s second novel, Ex-Libris, was published in the UK in 1998. The non-fictional Brunelleschi’s Dome, published in both the UK and the United States in 2000, was chosen the Book Sense Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year, spending several weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. King’s second popular history, the best-selling Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, was published in 2002 in both the UK and North America. It was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2003. In 2006, he won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction for the The Judgment of Paris: the Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism.

Justin Messner

Print Entry

Further Reading

Macpherson, Margaret. 1998. “Sask. Author Wins Literary Sweepstakes Abroad,” NeWest Review 24 (1): 6; Martin, Sandra. 2003. “Renaissance Man of the 21st Century.” Globe and Mail (March 8), R4.