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 best-selling Penguin History of New Zealand, which was the most popular New Zealand book of 2004.

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 PhD at Waikato (1978). In 1997 he received an honorary DLitt 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 Māori himself, King was well known for his knowledge of Māori 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 populace. 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 Pākehā (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 always sensitive to the fact that he was a Pākehā writing about the Māori world and always sought to establish close personal relationships with those he wrote about and their whānau, hapū and iwi authorities. He believed that all Pākehā had the same right to be called indigenous as Māori and disagreed with claims that only Māori have a spiritual association with mountains, lakes and rivers. He noted a recent tendency in literature to romanticise Māori life and indicated that certain aspects of Māori society in the pre-European era were harsher and less humane than the results of British colonisation.

King's two children with his first wife Ros are the filmmaker Jonathan King and novelist Rachael King. The marriage ended amicably in 1974, while they were sharing a communal house with two other families. 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 in Gore; King had planned to write a full biography on Money, but had lacked funding to do so in his lifetime.

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 a mystery at the time, but a coroner's inquest determined it 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), Officer of the 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 (non-fiction) (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.