Rudyard Kipling (1865 1936) was born in Bombay. During his time at the United Services College, he began to write poetry, privately publishing Schoolboy Lyrics in 1881. The following year he started work as a journalist in India, and while there produced a body of work, stories, sketches, and poems including Mandalay, Gunga Din, and Danny Deever which made him an instant literary celebrity when he returned to England in 1889. While living in Vermont with his wife, an American, Kipling wrote The Jungle Books, Just So Stories, and Kim which became widely regarded as his greatest long work, putting him high among the chronicles of British expansion. Kipling returned to England in 1902, but he continued to travel widely and write, though he never enjoyed the literary esteem of his early years. In 1907, he became the first British writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize.
Jan Montefiore (series editor) is a professor of twentieth-century English literature at the University of Kent. She is the author of Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (1996); Arguments of Heart and Mind: Selected Essays 1977-2000 (2002); Feminism and Poetry (3rd edition, 2004); and Rudyard Kipling (2007).
Harish Trivedi (editor/introducer) is a professor of English at the University of Delhi. He is author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1993), and has co-edited The Nation across the World: Postcolonial Literary Representations (2007) and Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990 (2000).
