Arthur Ransome

Arthur Ransome (January 18, 1884 - June 3, 1967) is best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, which tell of school-holiday adventures of teen-age children, mostly in the Lake District and Norfolk Broads areas of England, and mostly involving small sailing boats. They remain quite popular, to the point that they are a basis of a tourist industry around Lake Windermere.

Earlier in his life, Ransom was a newspaper reporter. In 1913 he visited Russia where he developed sympathy for the cause of Leon Trotsky and the Russian Revolution, and met his second wife, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, who was Trotsky's secretary. Upon his return to England, he published Old Peter's Russian Tales, a collection of 21 folktales from Russia, which was his main source of fame until writing the Swallows and Amazons series.