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Dr Ronald Blythe has had a long and illustrious career as a critic and writer. He made his name with Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969), an evocative book about agricultural life in Suffolk from the turn of the century to the 1960s. He has since written both novels and short stories, as well as a study of Paul Nash, John Nash and Dora Carrington entitled First Friends (1997). He edited Writing in a War (1982) and The Penguin Book of Diaries and Private Words: Letters and Diaries from the Second World War (1989), and has also edited a number of works for Penguin Classics.
His novel The Assassin was published in 2004, with John Updike commenting that “his words have the weight of things firmly fixed in the mind’s eye”. He is the author of the much-loved Wormingford Trilogy, a beautifully observed evocation of the changing English countryside, which consists of Word from Wormingford (1997), Out of the Valley (2000), and Borderland (2005). The trilogy was reissued by Canterbury Press in 2007, who also publish a collection of his popular Church Times columns, called A Year at Bottengorms Farm (2006). A collection of his selected essays, called Field Work, was published by Black Dog Books in 2007.
Ronald Blythe lives on the Suffolk-Essex border, where he draws inspiration for his unique and lyrical interpretations of the English countryside. In 2006, he was given the prestigious Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement. He is President of the John Clare Society, and of the Francis Kilvert Society.
Recent books:
Field Work: Selected Essays (Black Dog: 2007)
Word from Wormingford (Canterbury Press: 2007)
Out of the Valley (Canterbury Press: 2007)
Borderland (Canterbury Press: 2007)
A Year at Bottengorms Farm (Canterbury Press: 2006)
The Assassin (Black Dog: 2004)
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