A Lion Was Learning to Ski, and Other Limericks

When he came across an old-English limerick that made him laugh, playwright Ranjit Bolt started writing nonsensical verse to entertain his friends. On a whim he decided to staple some together and offer them at a market in his home town of Cambridge when not writing plays. Readers would go away chuckling to themselves and the booklets flew away. Their chuckling response led to A Lion Was Learning to Ski.

Ranjit Bolt was born in Manchester and studied at the University of Oxford. He worked in London for eight years as a stockbroker, writing and translating plays verse at night (his father is the poet and don Sydney Bolt, his uncle the poet and screenwriter Robert Bolt). When Jonathan Miller staged one of his plays, it became a surprise success and he a fulltime playwright. He now lives and writes in Cambridge and London.