Rudyard Kipling

Hello! My name is Rudyard Kipling, and I am a storyteller. I was born on a warm day, December 30th, 1865, in a city called Bombay in India. When I was a little boy, India was a magical place full of amazing sights, sounds, and smells. I loved hearing stories from my nanny about talking animals and mysterious jungles. When I was five, my parents sent me to England to go to school. I missed the warmth and sunshine of India very much, but I never forgot the stories I heard there.

When I was sixteen, in 1882, I got to go back to my beloved India! I got a job working for a newspaper. My job was to listen to people and write down all the interesting things they told me. I heard tales from soldiers, travelers, and all sorts of people. This was the best school for a storyteller! I traveled all over and filled my notebooks with ideas for poems and stories. Later, I moved to America and lived in a green house in Vermont. It was there, surrounded by snow instead of jungle vines, that I started writing my most famous stories for children.

Have you ever heard of a boy named Mowgli who was raised by wolves? I wrote his story in a book called The Jungle Book in 1894. I imagined his adventures with his friends, a big sleepy bear named Baloo and a sleek black panther named Bagheera. I also wrote the Just So Stories in 1902 to explain things like how the leopard got his spots. In 1907, I was given a very special award called the Nobel Prize for all the stories I had written. I was the very first writer who wrote in English to receive it!

I spent my life writing stories and poems for both children and grown-ups. My tales were filled with adventure, talking animals, and faraway places. I lived to be 70 years old, and I filled those years with as many stories as I could. Even today, children all around the world open my books and travel to the jungles of India with Mowgli, and my words continue to spark the imaginations of readers everywhere.