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Blythe Spirit: Event with biographer Ian Collins
15th November 2024, 7pm
£8.00
Ian Collins in conversation with Ros Green
Ronald Blythe (1922-2023) lived all his life in East Anglia and is considered one of the greatest writers on the English countryside.
Author of Blythe Spirit: The Remarkable Life of Ronald Blythe, Ian Collins was a close friend of Blythe’s. Drawing on unparalleled access to letters, notebooks, published works, drafts, and conversations from decades of friendship, he tells the full story of Ronald Blythe for the first time. The result is a sensitive, revelatory portrait which celebrates a fascinating, complex man and casts new light on one of our greatest writers.
This event will take place at the Old Library, Colchester Town Hall, where Blythe worked for 10 years as a reference librarian and where he founded the Colchester Literary Society.
ABOUT RONALD BLYTHE
Blythe was born in Acton, Suffolk in 1922. He served briefly during the Second World War before
working as a reference librarian in Colchester. Through his work at the library he met Christine Nash,
wife of the artist John Nash, who encouraged him to pursue his ambitions to be a writer. His writing
brought him to work with Benjamin Britten, E. M. Forster, Patricia Highsmith and many others. He died in January 2023 aged 100.
He is best known for Akenfield, his powerful and poetic account of life in a Suffolk farming community
which published in 1969 to instant acclaim and was adapted into a feature film by Peter Hall. His publications which have won countless awards also include Private Words, Field Work and Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literary and was awarded their prestigious Benson Medal in 2006. In 2017, he was appointed a CBE for services to literature.
IAN COLLINS is a writer and curator. He has written numerous biographies and monographs, including the Runciman Award-winning John Craxton: A Life of Gifts and James Dodds: The Blue Boat which won the Creative Suffolk Author Award. He had a long career as an arts writer for the Eastern Daily Press
Ian will be in conversation with Essex Book Festival Director, Ros Green, who grew up in Charsfield in East Suffolk in 1960s and 1970s: the inspiration for Ronald Blythes’s Penguin Classic Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village.
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