Born in Amsterdam, Hans Koningsberger (he changed his name in 1970) was the grandson of the noted Dutch poet Abraham van Collem and was raised in financially straitened circumstances by his unorthodox mother (who would take him to an upmarket restaurant and treat him to the best meal available, without any means of paying). He was educated at the University of Amsterdam before pursuing further studies in Zurich and Paris.
When Holland was occupied from 1940, Koning joined the Dutch Resistance, managing to escape to England, where he became one of the youngest sergeants in the British Army, serving in a tank division and working as a military interpreter during the Allied occupation of Germany. He later recalled that his wartime exposure to Nazi brutality had taught him "about how the darkness of towns felt in the Middle Ages ... how people used to live 'one day at a time', how cold it really is in winter."
After working as editor of the weekly Groene Amsterdammer, Koning accepted an invitation in 1950 to run a cultural programme on Radio Jakarta, and in 1951 he arrived in the US on a freighter from Indonesia. By now an experienced journalist, he began to concentrate on his fiction, and in 1958 The Affair was published to acclaim by Alfred Knopf. A series of novels followed, written in a characteristically terse and lucid style, dealing with failed love, political intrigue and the clash of ideologies. At the same time, in order to make a precarious living, Koning turned his hand to all manner of other writing - from studies of the Dutch Masters to children's literature.
From the 1960s Koning began to specialise in the political travelogue, travelling widely in the Soviet Union, China, South America and Europe. His European cultural and linguistic background gave his writing on events in 1968 France and his native Holland an insight lacked by many US contemporaries. Nor, despite his avowedly socialist sympathies, was he a blinkered traveller; his Along the Roads of the New Russia (1968) is a considered critique of Stalinism and its legacy, while Love and Hate in China (1966), one of the first accounts of the Cultural Revolution era by a Westerner (Koning had to wait four years for a visa), is a sober and sometimes witty assessment of everyday life under Mao.
Koning's political activism intensified with the Vietnam war, and he abandoned fiction in favour of what he called "committed literature", helping to form the influential anti-war Resist organisation with others such as Noam Chomsky. When the war ended in 1975, he moved to London with his family in "self-imposed exile", only to return to the US in 1988 (in 1978 he was naturalised as an American citizen).
His long-awaited bestseller finally arrived in 1976 in the unlikely form of Columbus: His Enterprise, a highly polemical biography of the Genoese adventurer that countered the prevailing orthodoxy of heroic discovery in favour of a dark story of exploitation and fanaticism. Published by the radical New York Monthly Review Press, the book both enraged traditionalists and attracted a politically conscious generation of "third world" activists. When the Columbus quincentenary came around in 1992, the book sold even better, fuelling debate on the real significance of the Columbian legacy. A follow-up, The Conquest of America (1993), was also a success, but could not match the iconic status of the biography.
Koning was disappointed that his fiction attracted less attention than his other writing, but four of his novels were made into films. A Walk with Love and Death, a tale of medieval plague and passion, was directed in 1969 by John Huston and marked the 15-year-old Anjelica Huston's debut, while the study of an alienated anarchist, The Revolutionary (1970), starred Jon Voight. Death of a Schoolboy (1990) was adapted by the BBC, and The Petersburg-Cannes Express (2003) was filmed in Moscow. None of these, to Koning's chagrin, gathered critical plaudits and all were more a source of trouble than pride for the novelist.
Koning could be a difficult character, as a long list of editorial and political contretemps attests, but he was also an intensely loyal friend and loving husband and father. His commitment to his own form of socialism, born out of personal experience and strengthened by the cold war, never wavered but was tempered by a genuine belief that the American people - if not their political leaders - could be a force for good. This sense of optimism, together with a genuinely internationalist and cultured outlook, ran through his long and varied career.