R brings with it 4 delightful and very talented authors. Yes, I can see that I am getting struck at 4 many times, but what to do, India has so much talent. I start with Ruskin Bond who is featured in R and not B as I felt he is more known by his first name. Plus this #AtoZChallenge cannot be complete without him.
Next I feature Rohinton Mistry is considered to be one of the foremost authors of Indian heritage writing in English. I have the author whose love story made a million hearts cry, Ravinder Singh. He is followed by the fiery, highly acclaimed Arundhati Roy.
Ruskin Bond (born 19 May 1934) is an Indian author of British descent. Perceived as the Indian ‘William Wordsworth’, Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli in the then Punjab Province in the year 1934. Born to a first generation British migrant, Bond spent most of his childhood in amidst Himalayas. His works has inspired several generations of writers, authors and scriptwriters. His novel named The Flight of Pigeons has been adapted into the acclaimed Merchant Ivory film Junoon.
The Indian Council for Child Education recognised his pioneering role in the growth of children’s literature in India, and awarded him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992 for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra, given by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Literature. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and Padma Bhushan in 2014. He now lives with his adopted family in Landour, in Mussoorie.
In London he started writing his first novel, The Room on the Roof, the semi-autobiographical story of the orphaned Anglo-Indian boy Rusty. 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 as Ghost Stories from the Raj, A Season of Ghosts, and A Face in the Dark and other Hauntings.
Collections / Antholgies
· Garland of Memories
· Ghost Stories from the Raj
· Funny Side Up
· Rain in the Mountains-Notes from the Himalayas
· Our trees still grow in Dehra
· Dust on the Mountains
· A Season of Ghosts
· Tigers Forever
· A Town Called Dehra
· At school with Ruskin Bond
· An Island of Trees
· The Night Train at Deoli
· A Face in the Dark and Other Hauntings
· Potpourri
· The Adventures of Rusty
· The Lost Ruby
· Crazy times with Uncle Ken
· The Death Of Trees
· Tales and Legends from India
· Time stops at Shamli
· Grandpa tickles a tiger
· Four Feathers
· School Days
· The Tiger In The tunnel
· Mr.Olivers diary
· The Parrot Who Wouldn’t Talk
· The Doctor
· Rusty – The Boy from Hills
· The Monkey Trouble
· Hip Hop Nature Boy
· Frogs in the fountain and Other Poems
· Ruskin Bond’s Book of Nature
· Tigers For Dinner: Tall Tales By Jim Corbett’s Khansama
· The Rupa Book of Haunted Houses
· The Rupa Book of Eerie Stories
· The Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories
· The Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories
· Friends in Small Places – Ruskin Bond’s Unfogettable People
· Ruskin Bond’s Green Book
· ” Best Friends”
Novels
· Vagrants in the Valley
· Scenes from a Writer’s Life
· Rusty Runs away
· Landour Days – A writers Journal
· The Road To The Bazaar
· The Panther’s Moon
· Once Upon A Monsoon Time
· The India I love
· The Kashmiri Storyteller
· Delhi is Not Far
· Animal Stories
· Funny side up
· Children omnibus
· Roads To Mussoorie
· All Roads Lead To Ganga
· Tales of Fosterganj
· Maharani
Rohinton Mistry (born 3 July 1952) is an Indian-born Canadian who writes in English. Mistry is of Indian origin, originally from Mumbai, and currently resides in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. Mistry won a Neustadt International Prize for Literature laureate (2012). Mistry’s first novel, Such a Long Journey (1991), brought him national and international recognition. Mistry’s subsequent novels have achieved the same level of recognition as his first. His second novel, A Fine Balance (1995), concerns four people from Bombay who struggle with family and work against the backdrop of the political unrest in India during the mid-1970s. The book won Canada’s Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. It was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was a finalist for the Booker Prize.
Ravinder Singh has written four novels entitled I Too Had a Love Story, Can Love Happen Twice?, “Like it happened Yesterday” and Your Dreams are Mine Now. He received a Bachelor of Engineering in computer science engineering from Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College in Karnataka. Then he moved to Bhubaneshwar to work at Infosys Technologies for five years. He did his MBA from Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. He was working as a Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft when he decided to become a full-time author. He met his girlfriend who died in 2007 before they got formally engaged. He adapted his own story into a novel. The book I Too Had a Love Story was reviewed by N. R. Narayana Murthy, Chairman Emeritus of Infosys Technologies, who called it “Simple, honest and touching”.
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is best known for the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction-winning novel The God of Small Things(1997), which became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author. She is also known as a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes. Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, to Rajib Roy, a Bengali Hindu tea plantation manager from Calcutta and Mary Roy, a Malayali Syrian Christian women’s rights activist from Kerala . Since winning the Booker Prize, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Damproject, India’s Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron‘s activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic ofneo-imperialism.
So here are my choices for R, Which is your favorite?
I am writing about INCREDIBLE INDIAN AUTHORS for the A to Z Challenge 2015.
Author bio from respective websites and wikipedia.
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