Arthur Ransome Arthur Ransome Arthur Michell Ransome (18 January 1884 – 3 June 1967) was an English author and journalist. He is best known for writing the "Swallows and Amazons" series of children's books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. The books remain popular and "Swallows and Amazons" is the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water, the two lakes Ransome adapted as his fictional North Country lake. He also wrote about the literary life of London, and about Russia before, during, and after the revolutions of 1917. His connection
Swallows and Amazons series discussion and theorising about precise relationships. This contributes strongly to the series' air of authenticity. The first book, "Swallows and Amazons", and four sequels — "Swallowdale", "Winter Holiday," "Pigeon Post" and "The Picts and the Martyrs" — are set in and around an unnamed lake in the English Lake District. Most of the unfinished "Coots in the North" would also have been set on the lake had Ransome completed it before his death. The lake and the surrounding fells are based on an amalgam of Windermere and Coniston Water, places where Ransome spent much of his childhood and later life.