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Michael Bond

Michael Bond
CBE
Born Thomas Michael Bond
(1926-01-13) 13 January 1926 (age 91)
Newbury, Berkshire
Residence London, England, UK
Nationality English
Citizenship British
Education Presentation College, Reading
Occupation Author
Years active 1945-present
Known for Author of the Paddington Bear series
Home town Newbury, Berkshire
Children 2 children

Thomas Michael Bond, CBE (born 13 January 1926) is an English author, best known for his Paddington Bear series of books. Bond was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2015.

Bond was born in Newbury and raised in Reading, Berkshire, where his visits to Reading Station to watch the Cornish Riviera Express go steaming through started a love of trains. His father was a manager for the post office. He was educated at Presentation College, a school in Reading, Berkshire. His time there was unhappy. He told UK newspaper The Guardian in November 2014 that his parents had chosen the school "for the simple reason my mother liked the colour of the blazers. She didn’t make many mistakes in life but that was one of them". Consequently, he left education aged fourteen, despite his parents’ wishes for him to go to university.World War II was under way and he went to work in a solicitor's office for a year and then as an engineer's assistant for the BBC.

In February 1943, Michael Bond survived an air raid in Reading. The building in which he was working collapsed under him, killing 41 people and injuring many more. Shortly afterwards he volunteered for aircrew service in the Royal Air Force as a 17-year-old but he was discharged after suffering from acute air sickness. He then served in the Middlesex Regiment of the British Army until 1947.

Bond began writing in 1945 whilst stationed with the army in Cairo and sold his first short story to the magazine London Opinion. He was paid seven guineas, and thought he "wouldn't mind being a writer". In 1958, after producing a number of plays and short stories and while working as a BBC television cameraman (where he worked on Blue Peter for a time), his first book, A Bear Called Paddington, was published. This was the start of Bond's series of books recounting tales of a bear from "Darkest Peru", whose Aunt Lucy sends him to the United Kingdom, carrying a jar of marmalade; the Brown family found the bear at Paddington Station, and adopted him, naming the bear after the railway station. By 1967, Bond was able to give up his BBC job to work full-time as a writer.


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