Swallows and Armenians

Where East and West collide in a story about friendship and family, love and jealousy, with a good measure of sailing thrown in!  

Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons is a classic book about children having adventures on a lake. The Walker family have always been depicted as quintessentially English but what is not widely known is that Ransome modelled his characters on an Anglo-Armenian family from Aleppo, Syria.  

This joyous actor-musician production delves into the fascinating but often fractured relationship between the British author and the family who inspired him to write his iconic book for children.  

Although a work of fiction, this production has been extensively researched using letters and diary entries from the Arthur Ransome archive, University of Leeds Special Collections; letters from the collection of Roger Wardale, now in The Arthur Ransome Society (TARS) archives; numerous publications and testimonies by Altounyan and Guzelian family members.  

There will be a pre-show talk by the writer Karen Babayan at 6.30pm.

Karen Babayan writer & producer is Anglo-Armenian, born in Iran. She arrived in Leeds in 1978 at the age of 16 and is now an established, multi-disciplinary artist, writer and curator. www.karenbabayan.com  

Persia Babayan-Taylor - director and composer is a creative of British-Armenian-Iranian heritage; she was born in Leeds and trained at Guildford School of Acting as an Actor-Musician.  

Supported by stage@leeds.  

Original photograph by Asadour Guzelian.  

Swallows and Armenians is supported by Lottery Funding from Arts Council England.