Clive King was born in Richmond, Surrey, in 1924. When he was young his family moved to a village called Ash, near Sevenoaks in Kent, which is the setting for Stig of the Dump. He was educated at King's School, Rochester; Downing College, Cambridge and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. During the war he served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and this, combined with his later work as a language teacher for the British Council, took him all over the world. Clive King attempted to learn fourteen languages including Tamil, Bengali, Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon. He said he was not incredibly successful with any of them, but many of his books deal with language difficulties of one sort or another.
