Ruth Manning-Sanders (21 August 1886 – 12 October 1988) was an English poet and author born in Wales, known for a series of children's books for which she collected and related fairy tales worldwide.
[1] After returning from a trip to Italy to recover from an illness that forced her to leave university, she went to Devon where she met English artist George Sanders.
She spent much of her early married life touring Britain in a horse-drawn caravan and working in a circus, a topic she wrote about extensively.
She writes in the foreword to a 1971 anthology, A Choice of Magic, that there can't be new fairy tales because they are "records of the time when the world was very young."
The stories in A Book of Dragons hail from Greece, China, Japan, North Macedonia, Ireland, Romania, Germany and elsewhere.
While many of Manning-Sanders's tales are not commonly known, she includes stories about more famous figures such as Baba Yaga, Jack the Giant-Killer, Anansi, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Robin Hood and Aladdin.
At least two of her early poetry collections – Karn and Martha Wish-You-Ill – were published by the Hogarth Press, run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
She won the Blindman International Poetry Prize in 1926 for The City, and was for a time a protégée of the English author Walter de la Mare, who spent at least one holiday with the Manning-Sanders family in Cornwall.
[7] She wrote seven more fairytale collections titled Giants Dwarfs, Witches, Wizards, Mermaids, Ghosts and Goblins and Princes and Princesses.