Book of limericks transforms struggling author Ranjit Bolt into literary lion

In the summer of 2014, the spectacle of a middle-aged playwright selling limericks about “comedic giraffes” and “Spanish cicadas” was a regular one at Cambridge market. But as more followed – elephants, sharks and “a young lady from Derry” – some quirky street-lyrics began morphing into literature.

Of all the thousands of new books published this autumn for the all-important Christmas market, few can have had a stranger back-story than Ranjit Bolt’s A Lion was Learning to Ski, a book of limericks that, in the words of Stephen Fry, both “rhymes and delights”.