Exclusive: Collection includes workbooks and index cards, and papers that show his research for bestseller Akenfield
One hundred years of a unique literary rural life will be made available to readers and researchers after the British Library acquired the archive of Ronald Blythe.
The author of Akenfield, a globally bestselling account of a Suffolk village in the throes of the agricultural and social revolution at the end of the 1960s, lived and wrote in East Anglia until his death in 2023 at the age of 100.
As a former librarian who remained firmly in the pre-computer age, Blythe’s papers were found to be immaculately ordered – a million words or more, in neat writing, in humble school workbooks and on index cards.
Even so, curators estimate it will take a year to fully catalogue his archive and better understand the treasures hidden in his books, letters and cards.
