Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay on 30 December 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, taught at the city's new School of Art, and his parents named him after Rudyard Lake, where they had courted. At five he was sent with his younger sister to board with a couple in Southsea, a stay he later recalled with horror, and he went on to the United Services College in Devon.

At 16 he returned to India to work on newspapers in Lahore and Allahabad, writing verse and short stories. In 1889 he moved to London, where his debut was greeted with acclaim. He married Caroline Balestier in 1892, and they lived in Vermont until 1896. From 1902 their home was Bateman's, at Burwash in Sussex.

The Jungle Book (1894) began in a snowbound Vermont cottage, where an earlier tale about a boy raised by wolves led him to write stories about Mowgli and the animals. Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, often named Kim (1901) as one of his favourite books. After his daughter Josephine died of pneumonia, Kipling gathered material for Just So Stories (1902). In 1907 he became the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

His only son, John, was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Kipling died in London on 18 January 1936, and his ashes lie in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. His reputation has changed with the political climate and can still stir passionate disagreement, while his children's stories remain popular.

Sources: wikipedia.org