Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. In 1871 he was brought home from India and spent five unhappy years with a foster family in Southsea, an experience he later drew on in The Light That Failed (1890). In 1882 Kipling started work as a journalist in India, and while there produced a body of work, stories, sketches and poems - notably Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) - which made him an instant literary celebrity when he returned to England in 1889. His most famous works include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901) and the Just So Stories (1902). Kipling refused to accept the role of Poet Laureate and other civil honours, but he was the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1907. He died in 1936.