HarpercollinsIndia
We have listed unknown and interesting facts about India author and poet Ruskin Bond.
Ruskin Bond continues to do what he loves the most– writing and telling stories. In a career spanning over 60 years, Ruskin Bond is truly called Indian William Wordsworth because his writing does create magic. He wanted to be a tap dancer when he was young.
Ruskin Bond was only four years old when his mother separated from his father, and later she married an Indian. Ruskin Bond was closest to his father. Unfortunately, in 1944 his father succumbed to malaria while being posted in Kolkata. Young Ruskin was 10 years old at the time when he got the news about his father’s untimely death through a teacher at the boarding school.
It was when Ruskin moved to Britain for roughly four years during his early twenties, that he realized he wanted to live in India and be a writer. It was during this time that he wrote his first novel ‘The Room on the Roof’, a semi-autobiographical story of an orphaned Anglo-Indian boy named Rusty and his adventures.
In 1956, his first book ‘The Room on the Roof’ was serialized in The Illustrated Weekly and the illustrations were made by the legendary cartoonist Mario Miranda. Some of his stories have also been adapted for the screen.
Ruskin Bond was 30 years old when he decided to give up his job in Delhi and instead settle down in Dehradun to become a full-time writer. And the rest is history. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999, and the Padma Bhushan in 2014. He lives in Landour, Mussoorie with his adopted family and can occasionally be seen at the bookstores in Mussoorie where he interacts with his readers.
He has authored over 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. His favorite and the first book he read in his childhood was Alice in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tale. He has also revealed that he is very lazy and gets grumpy when it rains. He believes that an author should be able to write anywhere. He is very quiet by nature and stays away from the attention of the media. Ruskin Bond never got married and lives with his adopted family in Mussoorie. Ruskin Bond started his career by working in a photo studio.
His personality was shaped in such a way that the first twenty years of his life groomed him to be a successful writer. A bond developed a positive outlook on life through his hardship and lonely youth. He preferred the direction that his father wanted him to take: becoming a serious novelist. As a result, he found solace in reading books, a habit instilled in him by his father. T. E. Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bront, and Rudyard Kipling are among his favorite writers.