A BOOK on the life of Swallows and Amazons author Arthur Ransome has won a top biography prize.
Roland Chambers, author of The Last Englishman: The Double LIfe of Arthur Ransome, took the £2,000 prize for best first biography at the Biographers’ Club annual dinner in Whitehall.
Mr Chambers’s book hit the headlines in August after controversially claiming Ransome had been a double agent, spying for both the Russians and British.
But Ransome, who lived in the Lake District in the 1920s and 1930s, basing his adventure stories around Coniston and Windermere, always remained taciturn about this aspect of his life, while his descendents pointed out the evidence in the book was neither as dramatic nor as sinister as the headlines suggested.
The biography was praised for its account of the Russian period of Ransome’s life, witnessing the Boleshevik revolution first hand.
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