Winter Holiday

Zusatztext

<p><i>'You know what it's like. Dark at teatime and sleeping indoors: nothing ever happens in the winter holidays.'</i></p><p>Or so Nancy thinks. Then the lake ices over completely and the Swallows and Amazons, along with Dick and Dorothea - the Ds - plan a race to find the North Pole. How will they reach it if they cant sail? By sledges of course! But when a blizzard blows up and there is a mix up about signals, the Ds disappear into the Arctic night. Disaster looms. Can the Swallows and Amazons save their friends?</p><p>BACKSTORY: Crack the Swallows and Amazons' code and learn all about the real Arctic exploration that inspired this book.</p>

Autorenportrait

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<i>Daily News</i>. In 1917 when the Russian Revolution began he became a journalist and was a special correspondent of the<i>Guardian</i>. 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<i>Swallows and Amazons</i>. 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 for the North Star and, in my mind's eye, could see the beloved sky-line of great hills beneath it. Swallows grew out of those old memories. I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself.'' He published the first of his children's classics, the twelve<i>Swallows And Amazons</i>books, in 1930. In 1936 he won the first ever Carnegie Medal for his book,<i>Pigeon Post</i>. He died in 1967.

Weitere Details