Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling was shaped by the fact of belonging to two cultures simultaneously. Born in Bombay in 1865, he was sent to England for schooling at six, returned to India as a journalist at 16, and spent the rest of his life trying to synthesise what that double formation meant.

His travel writing — From Sea to Sea (1899), American Notes (1891), Letters of Travel (1920) — is more journalistic than literary, but it is written with the confidence of a man who has actually been to the places he describes. He crossed the United States by train in 1889 and wrote about American cities with an amused colonial eye that American readers found both flattering and infuriating.

His Indian writing — the stories, the novel Kim, the journalism — constitutes the most complete literary account of British India that any single writer produced. Whether it is travel writing or fiction or something else entirely is a question critics still argue about.

He was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1907). His reputation has suffered since because of his enthusiasm for empire, but his prose — compressed, rhythmic, full of technical vocabulary — remains distinctive.