Gavin Maxwell FRSL FZS FRGS (15 July 1914 – 7 September 1969) was a Scottish naturalist and author, best known for his non-fiction writing and his work with otters.

Ring of Bright Water sold more than a million copies and was made into a film starring Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna in 1969.

In The Rocks Remain, he relates how family pressure led him to take a degree in Estate Management at Hertford College, Oxford, where he spent his time pursuing sporting and leisure activities instead of studying.

According to his book Harpoon at a Venture (1952), bad planning and a lack of finance meant his attempt to establish a basking shark fishery there between 1945 and 1948 proved unsuccessful and the island was sold to his business partner, Tex Geddes.

— Terry Nutkins, 2010[7]In The Rocks Remain (1963), the otters Edal, Teko, Mossy and Monday show great differences in personality.

The book demonstrates the difficulty Maxwell was having, possibly as a result of his mental state, in remaining focused on one project and the impact that had on his otters, Sandaig and his own life.

In Morocco, he was assisted by the monarchy's head of Press Services and Minister of Information Moulay Ahmed Alaoui, and by the anticolonial activist and journalist Margaret Pope, who Maxwell referred to in The Rocks Remain under a pseudonym, "Prudence Hazell."

Pope recruited Maxwell to travel to Algiers in January 1961 to collect information for the Algerian revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN).

Maxwell also began research for a non-fiction book tracing the dramatic lives of the last rulers of Marrakech under the French, eventually published in 1966 as Lords of the Atlas: The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua 1893–1956.

He invited John Lister-Kaye to join him on Eilean Bàn to help him build a zoo on the island and work on a book about British wild mammals.

Lister-Kaye accepted the invitation, but both projects were abandoned when Maxwell died from lung cancer[10] in a hospital in Inverness[10] the following year.

Privately homosexual,[13] Maxwell married Lavinia Renton (daughter of The Right Honourable Sir Alan Lascelles and granddaughter of Viscount Chelmsford, Wilfred Thesiger's uncle) on 1 February 1962.

[15] Maxwell's book Ring of Bright Water describes how, in 1956, he brought a smooth-coated otter back from Iraq and raised it in "Camusfearna" at Sandaig Bay on the west coast of Scotland.

The title of his book Ring of Bright Water was taken from the poem "The Marriage of Psyche" by Kathleen Raine, who said in her autobiography that Maxwell had been the love of her life.