Ruskin Bond

No living writer is more identified with the Uttarakhand hills than Ruskin Bond. From his home in Landour above Mussoorie, he has spent six decades writing the ordinary magic of hill life: its children, its trees, its ghosts and its slow trains.

Bond was born in 1934 in Kasauli and had an itinerant Anglo-Indian childhood in Jamnagar, Dehradun and Shimla. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, written in his teens about a Dehradun boyhood, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. After a spell in England and Delhi he settled in Landour in 1963 and never left.

From that ridge came hundreds of stories and essays: The Blue Umbrella, A Flight of Pigeons (filmed as Junoon), Rusty, the ghost stories, and a lifetime of sketches of Garhwal's people and seasons. His plain, warm prose made the hills a permanent address in Indian writing in English, and generations of readers met the Himalaya first through him.

He received the Sahitya Akademi award in 1992, the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014. Well past ninety, he still writes daily and still signs books at the Cambridge Book Depot on Mussoorie's Mall.