Born in Jamshedpur in 1945, Jayant Nobis grew up in schools run by Irish nuns, Anglican schoolmasters and American Jesuit priests. A good part of his early, impressionable, boyhood years were spent in the West Bengal heartland, that helped ingrain in him a close appreciation of Bengali lifestyle and culture which are elaborately reflected in this book. After his circuitous schooling he went on to graduate in Civil and Municipal Engineering from the Benares Hindu University.

A turn of events took him to Assam, his native land, where he joined the Assam Oil Company, a subsidiary of the British petroleum enterprise Burmah Oil Company, as a trainee officer, and left it as its Executive Director. Following the nationalization of the Assam Oil Company and its merger with the petroleum giant Indian Oil Corporation, he held assignments in Delhi, before retiring from the Indian Oil Corporation as an Executive Director in the year 2005. Thereafter he had a brief fling with English teaching, in fulfillment of a passion to help out weak students and working class people. He now resides at Gurugram in the National Capital Region.

"In A Riverside Fairytale" is his third book, the earlier ones being "In the Emerging City" and "In The Land of the Dihing".