Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, in 1934, and grew up in Jamna gar (Gujrat), Dehradun, and

Shimla. In course of a writing career spanning forty years, he has written over a hundred short stories, essays, novels, and more th an thirty books of children. Three collections of short stories, The Night Train at Deoli, Time Stops At Shamli, and Our Trees Still Grow In Dehra have been pub lished by Penguin India. he has also edited two anthologies, The Penguin Book Of Indian Ghost Stories, and The Penguin Book Of Indian Railway Stories. The Room On The Roof was his first novel, written when he was seventeen and it r ecieved the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial prize in 1957. Vagrants In The Valley w as also written in his teens and picked up from where The Room On TheRoof leaves off. These two novellas were published in one volume by Penguin India in 1993 a s was a much-acclaimed collection of his non-fiction writing, Rain In The Mounta in, Delhi Is Not Far : The Best Of Ruskin Bond was published by Penguin India th e following year. Rushkin Bond recieved the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India for 1992, for Our Trees Still Grow In Dehra. Summing up his last essay in The Lamp Is Lit, Ruskin writes: 'And there are many brave and good Indian writers, who wo rk in their own language -- be it Bengali or Oriya or Telugu or Marathi or fifte en to twenty others -- and plough their lonely furrow without benefit of agent o r media blitz or Booker prize. Some of them may despair. But even so, they work on in despair. Their rewards may be small, their readers few, but it is enough t o keep them from turning off the light. For they know that the pen, in honest an d gifted hands, is mightier than the grave.' Ruskin then goes on to write: 'And these are my parting words to you, dear Reader: May you have the wisdom to be si mple, and the humour to be happy.'