David Clive King (28 April 1924 – 10 July 2018[1]) was an English author best known for his children's book Stig of the Dump (1963).
[2] He served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in the last years of the Second World War and then worked for the British Council in a wide range of overseas postings from which he later drew inspiration for some of his novels.
From 1943 to 1946 he served as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, which took him to the Arctic, India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Australia, Malaya (now Malaysia) and Japan, where he saw the then-recent devastation of Hiroshima.
[4] After leaving the Reserve, King began working for the British Council and was posted to Amsterdam as an administrative officer (1948–50).
[8][9] Clive King acknowledged the influence of his itinerant career on his writing: "Each of the things which I have written has been inspired by a particular place which I have visited or lived in.
They return and save their city from invasion with the help of the three inventions they have found: celestial navigation, horsemanship and alphabetic writing.