Hans Koning was the author of more than 40 fiction and non-fiction books and a prolific journalist, contributing for almost 60 years to numerous publications including the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Harpers and The New Yorker.

Born in Amsterdam in 1921, he was educated at the University of Amsterdam (1939-1941), The University of Zurich (1941-1943), and the Sorbonne in 1946.

Escaping occupied Holland with the Resistance (he was a wearer of the Dutch Resistance Cross), he was one of the youngest sergeants in the British Liberation Army, 7 Troop, 4 Commando, working as an interpreter during the allied occupation of Germany at the end of the war.

From 1947 to 1950 he was the editor of the Groene Amsterdammer, a Dutch weekly. From 1950-51 he ran a cultural programme on Radio Jakarta, Indonesia. Shortly afterwards he travelled by freighter to the US. In 1958 he published his first novel, The Affair, to critical acclaim. He also began writing non-fiction books, among them Love and Hate in China (1966).

In 1970 he changed his name from Koningsberger to Koning, mostly because it was always being misspelled, and in 1978 he was naturalised as an American citizen. During the Vietnam War he turned his attention to the US anti-war movement. During this time he helped to found the still-active “Resist” organizsation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Noam Chomsky, among others.

His political life during those years left him with a dedication to what he called “committed literature”. In his contribution to Writers on Writing, Collected Essays from the New York Times, he says: “It means to me that if you want to write a serious novel, you should not only be out to entertain but you should also, in a hidden way, reflect on the world’s justice and injustice, hope and illusion”.

At the end of the Vietnam war in 1975 he moved his family back to London, only returning to the US in 1988 to make a permanent home in New York and Connecticut.

Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth, which he had published in 1976, sold 30,000 copies in 1992, the quincentennial of Columbus’s voyage. It was followed by The Conquest of America: How the Indian Nations Lost Their Continent in 1993.

Four of his novels — A Walk with Love and Death, The Revolutionary, Death of a Schoolboy, and The Petersburg-Cannes Express — were made into films.

Hans Koning, writer, was born on July 12, 1921. He died on April 13, 2007, aged 85