Arthur Michell Ransome

Arthur Michell Ransome (1884-1967), British journalist, literary critic, translator, and author of books for children. He is best known for his Swallows and Amazons series, begun in 1930, which became a children's classic for its imagination and for the elegance of its writing.

Ransome was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, but spent much of his early life in the English Lake District, a location that was to inspire the setting of many of the stories in the Swallows and Amazons series. In 1901 Ransome left Leeds University after only a few months of study and went to London to work. By 1903 he had decided to try to make his living as a freelance writer, and a book of his essays was published in 1904. His critical study of American writer Edgar Allan Poe was published in 1910. The previous year Ransome had married Ivy Walker, by whom he had one daughter, but the marriage was unhappy from the start. Ransome left alone for Russia in 1913 to learn the language in order to translate fairytales. He published Old Peter's Russian Tales in 1917, and subsequently began his long career as a journalist. In 1915 he became the Russian correspondent for the London Daily News, reporting on World War I (1914-1918) and on the Russian Revolution (1917). During this time he met the secretary to Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Evgenia Shelepin, with whom Ransome went to Estonia in 1919, and whom he married in 1924. After publishing Six Weeks in Russia in 1919, Ransome became the foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, and he traveled in the Middle East and East Asia in this capacity. In 1928-1929 he returned to the writing of books with Swallows and Amazons (1930), an adventure story about a group of children on vacation and the first of the 12 books in the Swallows and Amazons series.

Ransome was awarded the first Library Association Carnegie Medal in 1937 for Pigeon Post (1937), one of the Swallows and Amazons books. The medal became thereafter an annual award for an outstanding children's book written in English and published in the United Kingdom. In 1952 Ransome was granted an honorary doctor of letters degree from the University of Leeds. He was made Commander of the British Empire (CBE), a member of a British order of knighthood, in 1953.