Clive King was born in Richmond, Surrey in 1924. When he was a baby his family moved to a village called Ash, near Sevenoaks in Kent, which is the setting for Stig of the Dump. He went to local schools, then King's School, Rochester and Downing College, Cambridge. During the war he served in the Royal Navy, voyaging to Iceland, twice to the Russian Arctic, to India, Sri Lanka, Australia, East Indies, Malaysia and Japan, where he observed the ruins of Hiroshima within months of its destruction. Civilian postings as an officer of the British Council took him to Amsterdam, Belfast, Aleppo, Damascus (styled as Visiting Professor to the University), Beirut, Dhaka and Madras, and gave opportunities for independent travel between these places and England. Several of these exotic places provided material for his nineteen children's stories, but his best-known book STIG OF THE DUMP he wrote in an educational job at Rye, East Sussex. The BBC broadcast a new television adaptation in early 2002.
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