Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865, and sent to school in England at five. He went back to India at sixteen to work on a newspaper, and the stories and poems he wrote there made him famous.

The Jungle Book of 1894 and Just So Stories of 1902 are his best-loved books for children. In 1907 he became the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Some of his writing about the British Empire is troubling to read today, but his animal stories remain classics. He died in 1936.