RUSKIN BOND

BYPRINCE DAGAR

IX-A

Better perceived as the Indian 'William Wordsworth', Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli in the then Punjab Province in the year 1934. Born to a first generation British migrant, Bond spent most of his childhood in amidst Himalayas. He was brought up at different places that included Jamnagar, Dehradun and Shimla. As customary in that period he went to England for his primary studies. Although Bond was studying in England, his mind rested in India. 

He had forged an intimate relationship with the Himalayas and longed for it. He is very quite by nature and stays away from the attention of the media in a small hill station in India and when asked once how he feel about living in India he said that it was stressful in practical sense as compared to England but at the end of the day India is home to him. To know more about Bond, continue reading this insightful biography on him. 

Bond was born to Edith Clerke and Aubrey Bond. Edith Clerke was working with the Royal Air Force that time. At the age of 4, Bond’s mother Aubrey Bond remarried a Punjabi-Hindu called Hari and bond wen to live with his new father, spending his childhood in Jamnagar and Shimla. From the age often, for a few years, Bond went to live with his grandmother in Dehradun, after the sudden death of his father due to malaria. He did most of his schooling from the Bishop Cotton School, Shimla. During this time, he won many accolades in writing like the Irwin Divinity Prize and the Hailey Literature Prize. 

In the course of a writing career spanning thirty five years, he has written over a hundred short stories, essays, novels and more than thirty books for children. Three collections of short stories, The Night Train at Deoli, Time Stops at Shamli and Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra have been published by Penguin India. He has also edited two anthologies, The Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories and The Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories. Bonds writing is greatly influenced by the hills, and the valley of Dehra Dun, where he spent his childhood. 

Ruskin Bond's first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Vagrants in the Valley was also written in his teens and picks up from where The Room leaves off. These two novellas were published in one volume in 1993. His non-fiction writing, Rain in the Mountains was also much acclaimed. Since then he has written several novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons and Delhi Is Not Far), essays, poems and children's books. 

Ruskin Bond has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. His novel, The Flight of Pigeons was adapted into a movie, Junoon.