Arthur Ransome

Notable Works

• The Crisis in Russia (1921)
• Swallows and Amazons (1930)
• Pigeon Post (1936)

About

Arthur Michell Ransome was born in Leeds, the eldest of four children. The family regularly holidayed in the Lake District. Ransome was educated first in Windermere then Rugby School (where he lived in the room used by Lewis Carroll). His father’s premature death when he was thirteen had a lasting effect. Because of his poor eyesight, lack of athletic skill, and limited academic achievement, Ransome left Rugby to study chemistry at Yorkshire College but abandoned his studies and left for London to become a writer, taking low-paying jobs in a publishing company and editing a failing magazine. He wrote The Nature Books for Children, but only three of six planned volumes commissioned by Anthony Treherne appeared before Treherne went bankrupt. He wrote biographies of Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde; the latter embroiled Ransome in a libel suit with Lord Alfred Douglas, and his publisher Charles Granville fled the country without paying him. Ransome won a public court case, but the stress exacerbated his poor health and the breakdown of his marriage.

In WWI, Ransome was an Eastern Front correspondent for The Daily News and covered the 1917 Russian Revolutions, becoming close to Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Karl Radek and the woman who would become his second wife, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, Trotsky’s personal secretary. In October 1919, Ransome returned to Moscow for The Manchester Guardian and delivered a secret armistice proposal on behalf of the Estonian government to the Bolsheviks, crossing battle lines on foot and returning with Evgenia. Estonia withdrew from the conflict, and Ransome and Evgenia set up home in Tallinn, where he built cruising yacht, Racundra. Following their marriage, Ransome and Evgenia settled in the Lake District, where he wrote Swallows and Amazons (1929) – the first of the series that made his reputation. His move to East Anglia changed the setting for later books. A lifelong sailing enthusiast, after the Racundra, Ransome owned five further cruising yachts, ending with Lottie Blossom II.  He won the inaugural Carnegie Medal for the year’s best children’s book from the Library Association for Pigeon Post in the Swallows and Amazons series. He was appointed CBE in 1953. Translations of his books have been published in many languages and countries. Czech astronomer Antonin Mrkos named the asteroid ‘6440 Ransome’ after the author.

Legacy

Inspired by Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books, two schoolchildren, Pamela Whitlock and Katharine Hull, wrote The Far-Distant Oxus and Ransome persuaded his own publisher Jonathan Cape to produce it, describing it as “the best children’s book of 1937”.

His gift of Royalties /Copyright to the RLF from his literary estate helps support future generations of writers.