M.K. Joseph

Michael Kennedy Joseph (1914–1981) was a British born New Zealandpoet and novelist. He wrote in several genres ranging from I'll Soldier No More, A Pound of Saffron and A Soldier's Tale, to the science fiction works The Hole in the Zero and The Time of Achamoth, to the historical novel Kaspar's Journey.

Life
Joseph was born in Chingford, Essex, to a middle-class Catholic family, a month before the outbreak of World War I. As an adult he retained "sharp but disconnected" memories of wartime London. After the war his family lived in France and Belgium, where he learned to speak and write English and French simultaneously. In 1924 the family moved to New Zealand, where Joseph attended Tauranga District High School, Te Puke High School, and Sacred Heart College in Auckland. Afterwards he studied English at Auckland University, where he received a B.A. and a Master of Arts (postgraduate) in 1934.

After graduation, Joseph worked as a junior lecturer at Auckland for two years, before going to Merton College, Oxford. He graduated from Oxford at the beginning of World War II, and enlisted in the Royal Artillery and an Air Observation unit, serving in England, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany.

Joseph returned to New Zealand in 1946, and rejoined Auckland University as a lecturer. During the next few years he also began publishing poetry; his first collection, Imaginary Islands, was published in 1950. In 1951 he began "writing a series of sketches recording impressions of ordinary life in wartime Britain, France and Germany," which became his first novel, I'll Soldier No More (published in 1958).

Publications
In 1970 Joseph was promoted to professor at Auckland. 1976 saw the publication of what is perhaps his best-known novel, A Soldier's Tale.