Ruskin Bond: the teenager who wrote a novel and never stopped

A childhood across India

Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, in present-day Himachal Pradesh, in 1934. According to his publisher Penguin, he grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Shimla. The hill towns of his childhood, and especially Dehradun, would later become the setting for much of his writing.

When he finished school, he has said, becoming a writer was not a fashionable choice; writers were known by their names, not their faces, and very few made a living from it.

A first novel at seventeen

After school, Bond spent about four years in the Channel Islands and London. There, at seventeen, he wrote his first novel, The Room on the Roof. It tells the story of Rusty, an orphaned Anglo-Indian boy, and draws on Bond's own teenage years and friends.

The book won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957, an award for a young Commonwealth writer under thirty. Bond returned to India in 1955 and, his American publisher notes, has never left the country since.

Decades of writing from Mussoorie

Bond chose the hills as his home and his workplace. He lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his extended family. He told Gulf News that living in the hills gave him more to write about and that he never runs out of ideas. Growing older, he added, only gives a writer more to look back on, as long as the memory is good.

The output is large. His publishers credit him with more than 500 short stories, essays and articles, novellas such as Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons and Delhi Is Not Far, poems, and more than forty books for children. He says he does not set out to write for children or for adults; he writes a story, and it may turn out to suit either.

Even in his late eighties, he described a simple routine: starting the day around eight or nine in the morning and aiming to write 500 words. He laughed that on the day of the interview he had managed only 300. He also keeps trying new forms; in that interview he was experimenting with limericks, and he said a writer should explore different genres.

His stories have travelled beyond books. The Hindi film Saat Khoon Maaf was based on his short story Susanna's Seven Husbands. In his books he has also written about simple pleasures, like long walks in the mountains, and about how living close to nature teaches patience and keeps loneliness away.

Recognition

Bond received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India in 1992, the Padma Shri in 1999, the Delhi government's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014 for his contribution to literature. One source lists the Sahitya Akademi Award as 1993, but the Indian publisher and most records give 1992.

Asked about his life, he has called himself a writer without regrets, someone who has written the things he wanted to write.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first was starting young and not waiting. Bond began a full novel as a teenager, long before anyone called him a writer. The prize came after the work, not before it.

The second was a daily target. Aiming for a few hundred words each morning, and forgiving himself when he fell short, kept him writing for more than seven decades.

The third was writing about what he saw. The hills, small towns and people around him gave him endless material, and his memory turned old experiences into new stories.

The fourth was simplicity. His sentences are short and clear, which is one reason readers of every age can enjoy them.