Christina Koning is an award-winning novelist, journalist and academic. She was born in Kuala Belait, Borneo, and spent her early childhood in Venezuela and Jamaica. After coming to England, she was educated at the University of Cambridge, Newcastle College of Art, and the University of Edinburgh, eventually settling in south east London.Her first novel, 'A Mild Suicide' (Methuen, 1992), set in Edinburgh in 1977, was short-listed for the David Higham Prize for Fiction. 'Undiscovered Country' (Viking, 1997), won the Encore Award for the best second novel and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Set in the 1950s Venezuela of her early childhood, the novel explored aspects of colonialism - a theme dealt with elsewhere in Koning's fiction, notably in 'Fabulous Time' (Viking, 2000), which is partly set in China during the 1911 revolution and was awarded a Society of Authors' Travelling Scholarship, and 'The Dark Tower' (Arbuthnot, 2010), set in South Africa during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879.More 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 late 1920s. 'Game of Chance' (Arbuthnot, 2015), set in 1929, continues the 'Blind Detective' series, and is followed in Autumn 2016 by the third novel in the series, ’Time of Flight'.She has worked extensively as a travel writer and literary critic – notably as Books Editor for The Times and Cosmopolitan, and on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour - and is currently a judge for the Society of Authors' McKitterick Prize. As an academic, she has taught Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and University of London, and was the 2014-15 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She now teaches at Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education at Madingley Hall.Christina Koning has two grown-up children and lives in Cambridge.