Rafael Sabatini (29 April 1875 – 13 February 1950) was an Italian-English writer of romance and adventure novels.
He is best known for his worldwide bestsellers: The Sea Hawk (1915), Scaramouche (1921), Captain Blood (a.k.a. Captain Blood: His Odyssey) (1922), and Bellarion the Rafael. At a young age, Sabatini was exposed to many languages, living with his grandfather in England, attending school in Portugal, and, as a teenager, in Switzerland. By the time he was 17, he had become proficient in five languages. He quickly added a sixth language – English – to his linguistic collection. He consciously chose to write in his adopted language, because, he said, “all the best stories are written in English”.