Promotional Information

WINNER OF THE FIRST EVER CARNEGIE MEDAL IN 1936.

About the Author

Arthur Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884. He had an adventurous life - as a baby in he was carried by his father to the top of the Old Man of Coniston, a peak that is 2,276ft high! He went to Russia in 1913 to study folklore and in 1914, at the start of World War I he became a foreign correspondent for the Daily News. In 1917 when the Russian Revolution began he became a journalist and was a special correspondent of the Guardian. He played chess with Lenin and married Trotsky's personal secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina. On their return to England, he bought a cottage near Windermere in the Lake District and began writing children's stories. In a 1958 author's note, Ransome wrote- ''I have been often asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons. The answer is that it had its beginning long, long ago when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston. We played in or on the lake or on the hills above . . . Going away from it we were half drowned in tears. While away from it, as children and as grown-ups, we dreamt about it. No matter where I was, wandering about the world, I used at night to look fo

Reviews

"A truly wonderful book by a gifted and now unforgivably neglected children's writer" * Times Educational Supplement * "In its own class, and wearing several gold stars for distinction. Pigeon Post stands head and shoulders above the average adventure book for and of children" * The Times * "There is plenty of excitement, a little danger, a quality of thinking, planning and fun in connection with a gold-mine. The ingenuity of this group of children is delightful and stimulating" * Times Literary Supplement *