Ruskin Bond (born 19 May 1934) is an Indian author of British descent who has written more than 500 short stories, novels, essays and poems, many of them for children. His gentle tales of small-town life, trains, trees and the hills of North India have been read by generations of Indian schoolchildren. He has lived in Landour, above Mussoorie, since 1963. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2014.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Ruskin Bond |
| Born | 19 May 1934, Kasauli, Punjab States Agency, British India (now Himachal Pradesh) |
| Age | 92 |
| Occupation | Author |
| Education | Bishop Cotton School, Shimla |
| Lives in | Landour, Mussoorie, Uttarakhand |
| Honours | Sahitya Akademi Award (1992), Padma Shri (1999), Padma Bhushan (2014) |
| Known for | The Room on the Roof, The Blue Umbrella, the Rusty stories |
Early Life
Bond was born in Kasauli to Aubrey Bond, who taught the princesses of Jamnagar and later served in the Royal Air Force, and Edith Clarke. His parents separated when he was eight. He was very close to his father, who died of malaria in 1944, when Ruskin was ten. He was then brought up by his mother and his Punjabi stepfather in Dehradun and at boarding school in Shimla, a lonely childhood that runs through his stories.
Career
After school he went to the Channel Islands and London, where he worked in offices and wrote his first novel at seventeen. The Room on the Roof, about an Anglo-Indian boy called Rusty who runs away from his guardian in Dehradun, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1957. He used the money to sail home to India.
He worked for a few years as a journalist in Delhi and Dehradun and in 1963 moved to Mussoorie to write full-time. From his small cottage, Ivy Cottage, he has produced a steady flow of stories, novellas and memoirs, among them The Night Train at Deoli, Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award, A Flight of Pigeons, Time Stops at Shamli and Rain in the Mountains.
A Flight of Pigeons was filmed as Junoon (1978) by Shyam Benegal, starring Shashi Kapoor. Vishal Bhardwaj adapted The Blue Umbrella (2005) and turned the story “Susanna’s Seven Husbands” into 7 Khoon Maaf (2011), in which Bond made a brief appearance.
Personal Life
Bond never married. He lives with his adopted family, the children and grandchildren of Prem Singh, who came to work for him in the 1960s. On Saturdays he used to sign books for long queues of readers at a bookshop on Mussoorie’s Mall Road.
Selected Works
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where was Ruskin Bond born?
Ruskin Bond was born on 19 May 1934 in Kasauli, Punjab States Agency, British India (now Himachal Pradesh) and is 92 years old.
What is Ruskin Bond known for?
Known for: The Room on the Roof, The Blue Umbrella, the Rusty stories.
What honours has Ruskin Bond received?
Sahitya Akademi Award (1992), Padma Shri (1999), Padma Bhushan (2014).
Featured image: Ruskin Bond at a book event in Bengaluru, June 2012. Photo by Jim Ankan Deka, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
