Author: Ronald Blythe

Ronald Blythe has written novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism and social history, all inspired by the landscape and people of his beloved East Anglia. He is best known for Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, in which he sought to commit to paper the many unheard voices of a struggling Suffolk agricultural community. Now immortalized as a Penguin Modern Classic, Akenfield is widely recognized as one of the great depictions of English rural life. As an editor of Penguin Classics for more than twenty years, Blythe has edited modern versions of works by writers such as Thomas Hardy, Henry James and William Hazlitt, as well as a number of anthologies. In 2006 he received the Benson Medal, the highest honor of the Royal Society of Literature. He is also President of the John Clare Society, and continues to live the life of “a solitary man who is serene and not bitter and who loves nature and poetry.”