Roland Chambers

Roland Chambers is an award-winning biographer, children’s author and illustrator. His biography of Arthur Ransome, The Last Englishman, describes Ransome’s career as a pro-Bolshevik journalist during the Russian Revolution before the publication of Swallows and Amazons and won the H. W. Fisher Best First Biography prize as well as a Jerwood award from the RSL. His most recent novels for children, which he wrote and illustrated, follow the adventures of Billy Shaman as he visits key moments in the cartographical discovery of the world. 

In 2009, Roland joined the charity First Story, which places authors in secondary schools. For seven years he worked at Pimlico Academy and the Bridge in Fulham, publishing his students’ best work in partnership with Bloomsbury and Scholastic. He also worked as a visiting writer to Pentonville Prison and as writer in residence at Highgate School. His maps for Lev Grossman’s best-selling Magicians trilogy appeared in the Thames and Hudson anthology, The Writer’s Map, while his design for the floor of Ely Museum – illustrating fifty million years of the Fens – was laid in 2020. He is now working on a novel for adults, Grace, which tells the story of an evacuee who spends the Second World War on a farm owned by her estranged mother.

Roland studied literature in Scotland, film in Poland, and literature and film in New York, before returning to London where for several years he worked as a freelance analyst for the private intelligence company, Kroll. He now lives with his family on a small farm on Dartmoor.  

Audio from Roland Chambers