Autobiographical Elements of the Room on the Roof Essay Example

for lifetime. The novel is the winner of John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and is certainly a pleasure to read. About the author Ruskin Bond was born in a military hospital in Kasauli to Edith Clerke and Aubrey Bond. His siblings were Ellen and William. Ruskin’s father was with the Royal Air Force.

When Bond was four years old, his mother was separated from his father and married a Punjabi-Hindu, Mr. Hari, who himself had been married once. Bond spent his early childhood in Jamnagar and Shimla. At the age of ten Ruskin went to live at his grandmother's house inDehradun after his father's sudden death in 1944 from malaria. Ruskin was raised by his mother, who remarried an Indian businessman. He completed his schooling at Bishop Cotton School in Shimla, from where he graduated in 1952 after winning several writing competitions in the school like the Irwin Divinity Prize and the Hailey Literature Prize.

Following his high school education e spent four years in England. In London he started writing his first novel, The Room on the Roof, the semi-autobiographical story of the orphaned Anglo-Indian boy Rusty. It won the 1957 John Llewellyn Rhys prize, awarded to a British Commonwealth writer under 30. Bond used the advance money from the book to pay the sea passage to Bombay. He worked for some years as a journalist in Delhi and Dehradun. Since 1963 he has lived as a freelance writer in Mussoorie, a town in the Himalayan foothills. [1] He wrote Vagrants in the Valley, as a sequel to The Room on the Roof. These two novels were published in one volume by

Penguin India in 1993.

The following year a collection of his non-fiction writings, The Best Of Ruskin Bond was published by Penguin India. His interest in the paranormal led him to write popular titles such asGhost Stories from the Raj, A Season of Ghosts, A Face in the Dark and other Hauntings. The Indian Council for Child Education recognised his pioneering role in the growth of children's literature in India, and awarded him the Sahitya Academi Award in 1992 for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. He received the Padma Shri in 1999. Media-shy, he currently lives in Landour, Mussoorie’s Ivy Cottage, which has been his home since 1964.