Kim

Born in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1865, Rudyard Kipling was taken to England in 1871 and lived for five years with a foster-family in Southsea before going to the United Services College in Devon. He returned to India in 1882 to work as a reporter, and the many poems, sketches and stories he wrote during his time there brought him great literary acclaim. Kipling married Caroline Balestier and moved temporarily to Vermont where he wrote the two Jungle Books. They and their three children travelled extensively, particularly in South Africa, and Kipling became a fierce proponent of the Boer War. Identifying from the outset with the rulers and officials of the British Empire, Kipling nonetheless refused a knighthood, British Poet Laureateship and Order of Merit. He won the Nobel Prize in 1907, six years after publication of Kim, his masterpiece. After the death of his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915 he became involved in the War Graves Commission. Kipling died in 1936, at the age of seventy.