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Ross King (author)
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Ross King is a Canadian novelist and non-fiction writer. He began his career by writing two works of historical fiction in the 1990s, later turning to non-fiction, and has since written several critically acclaimed and best-selling historical works.

Novels and Books

King's first novel, Domino, (1995), tells the story of a castrato singer seen through the experience of an aspiring painter in the London of the 1770s.

In 1998, King published Ex-Libris, his second work of historical fiction. Set in London and Prague, it chronicles how a London bookseller's search in the 1660s for a missing manuscript leads him unwittingly into a world of deception and murder.

Brunelleschi's Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral in Florence (2000) describes how the Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi
Filippo Brunelleschi
Filippo Brunelleschi was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. He is perhaps most famous for inventing linear perspective and designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, but his accomplishments also included bronze artwork, architecture , mathematics,...

 designed what still stands as the largest masonry dome ever built: the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore
Santa Maria del Fiore
The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore is the cathedral church of Florence, Italy. The Duomo, as it is ordinarily called, was begun in 1296 in the Gothic style to the design of Arnolfo di Cambio and completed structurally in 1436 with the dome engineered by Filippo Brunelleschi...

, completed in 1436. Brunelleschi's Dome marked King's transition from novelist to writer of histories and biographies. Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, (2002), follows the four arduous years during which Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...

 painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
Sistine Chapel
Sistine Chapel is the best-known chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope in Vatican City. It is famous for its architecture and its decoration that was frescoed throughout by Renaissance artists including Michelangelo, Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Pinturicchio...

 amid the political and religious intrigues of early sixteenth-century Rome.

King's next book, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (2006), was met by much critical acclaim and considerable commercial success. By contrasting the works and lives of the French painters Ernest Meissonier and Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....

, the book chronicles the dramatic transition by which the Impressionist painters
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...

 changed the artistic vision of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. King received Canada's 2006 Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction for this book.

King's most recent book, part of the Eminent Lives series, was Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power (2007), a biography of Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. He is one of the main founders of modern political science. He was a diplomat, political philosopher, playwright, and a civil servant of the Florentine Republic...

 in which King illustrates the personal, social and political development of one of history's most famous political theorists.

King was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan, Canada and was raised in the nearby village of North Portal. He received his undergraduate university education at the University of Regina, where in 1984 he completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in English Literature. Continuing his studies at the University of Regina, he received a Master of Arts degree in 1986 upon completing a thesis on the poet T.S. Eliot. Later he achieved a Ph.D. from York University in Toronto (1992), where he specialized eighteenth-century English literature.

King moved to England to take up a position as a post-doctoral research fellow at University College, London. It was at this time that he began writing his first novel.

For Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, King was nominated in 2003 for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Brunelleschi’s Dome was on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle, and was the recipient of several awards including the 2000 Book Sense Nonfiction Book of the Year.

Personal Life

He lectures frequently in both Europe and North America, and has given guided tours of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

King currently lives in Woodstock, England with his wife Melanie.

Awards

2000, Nonfiction Book of the Year citation, Book Sense, for Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

2003, Governor-General's Literary Award (Canada) nomination for Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

2003, National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

2006, Governor-General's Literary Award (Canada) for Non-Fiction for The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism

External links


Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

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