Ruskin Bond Biography: Ruskin Bond was born in India on 19 May 1934. The Room on the Roof, his first novel, was published in 1956 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1957. Bond has written over 500 short stories, essays, and novels, including 69 children’s books. The Sahitya Akademi Award was given to him in 1992 for his work Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. In 1999, he received the Padma Shri, and in 2014, he received the Padma Bhushan.
Ruskin Bond Biography
Early Life
Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Punjab, British India, on 19 May 1934 to British parents Edith Clarke and Aubrey Bond. From 1939 to 1944, his father served with the Royal Air Force.
His parents divorced when he was small, and his mother remarried a Punjabi man shortly thereafter. Ruskin was very close to his father, who passed away at the age of 10 from hepatitis.
He attended Shimla’s Bishop Cotton School, from which he matriculated in 1950. He enjoyed literature, and the works of T. E. Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bront, and Rudyard Kipling had a significant impact on him. Soon after, he shifted his focus to writing and won multiple writing competitions at his school, including the Irwin Divinity Prize and the Hailey Literature Prize. In 1951, at the age of 16, he penned one of his earliest short stories, “Untouchable.”
After completing high school, he moved to the United Kingdom in pursuit of better opportunities. While in London, he started writing his first novel, “The Room on the Roof.” It was awarded the 1957 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize to a British Commonwealth author under 30.
Ruskin Bond Career
Ruskin Bond spent some time working in a photography studio while searching for a publisher for his works. Once he began earning a living from his writing, he returned to India and settled in Dehradun. He worked as a freelance writer for the next few years, penning short stories and poems for newspapers and periodicals. He moved to Mussoorie in 1963, where he furthered his writing career.
His essays and articles were published in numerous journals and newspapers, including ‘The Pioneer,’ ‘The Leader,’ ‘The Tribune,’ and ‘The Telegraph’ at this time. Additionally, he edited a magazine for four years. ‘The Blue Umbrella’, one of his most popular novels, was published in 1980. His growing notoriety as a writer drew the interest of Penguin Books. In the 1980s, the publishers approached Bond and asked him to write a few novels. In 1993, Penguin India published ‘The Room on the Roof’ and its sequel ‘Vagrants in the Valley’ together in a single volume.
A number of his works, including “The Best of Ruskin Bond” and the short story collections “The Night Train at Deoli,” “Time Stops at Shamli,” and “Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra,” were published. His popular supernatural works include ‘Ghost Stories from the Raj,’ ‘A Season of Ghosts,’ and ‘A Face in the Dark and Other Hauntings,’ among others. Ruskin Bond’s writing career encompasses more than five decades, during which he experimented with various genres, including fiction, essays, autobiographical, non-fiction, romance, and children’s literature. He has written more than 500 short stories, essays, and novels, more than 50 books for children, and two volumes of autobiography, ‘Scenes from a Writer’s Life’ and ‘The Lamp is Lit’.
Major Works
The novel ‘The Blue Umbrella’ is among his most well-known works. The story is about a young girl who exchanges her old leopard claw necklace for a beautiful blue umbrella with frilly detailing. It is a simple but heartwarming tale set in a small Himachal Pradesh village that was subsequently adapted into a Hindi film by Vishal Bhardwaj and a comic by Amar Chitra Katha publications.
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Awards & Achievements
Ruskin Bond received the Sahitya Academy Award for ‘Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra’ in 1992.
In 1999, he received the Padma Shri, and in 2014, he received the Padma Bhushan.
Personal Life of Ruskin Bond
Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, British India, to Edith Clarke and Aubrey Alexander Bond. His father taught the princesses of the Jamnagar palace English. Bond and his sister Ellen resided there until he turned six. In 1939, his father joined the Royal Air Force, and Bond, along with his mother and sister, moved to his maternal home in Dehradun. He was subsequently sent to a boarding institution in Mussoorie. Bond’s parents divorced when he was eight years old, and his mother married Hari, a Punjabi Hindu. When his father was transferred to New Delhi, he made arrangements for Ruskin to reside with him. Bond was close to his father, and he considers his time spent with him to be one of the fondest of his life. His father was stationed in Calcutta when he was ten years old and died in the conflict. He was later reared in Dehradun.
