Rudyard Kipling

Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his earliest years speaking Hindustani as readily as English. At six he was sent to England, where a harsh foster home supplied some of the fear and divided belonging that returned throughout his fiction. He went back to India at sixteen to work on newspapers in Lahore and Allahabad, learning the pressures of deadlines, the rhythms of reported speech and the crowded social worlds that became his first great material.

The stories and poems travelled faster than he did. Plain Tales from the Hills, the Barrack-Room Ballads and The Jungle Book made him famous before he was thirty; Kim joined espionage, pilgrimage and an exact eye for roads into one of the defining novels of British India. In 1907 he became the first English-language writer, and at forty-two the youngest recipient to that date, to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

His command of voice is inseparable from the empire whose assumptions he often accepted and celebrated. That tension has never stopped troubling his reputation, nor should it. His only son John was killed at Loos in 1915 after Kipling helped him obtain a commission despite poor eyesight. Kipling spent years helping the Imperial War Graves Commission find the words by which the dead would be remembered, including the biblical phrase used on unidentified graves: Known unto God.