Ronald Blythe

Ronald Blythe's Akenfield, in 1969, gave voice to a Suffolk village through the words of its farm workers, blacksmith, vet, teachers and gravedigger, recorded in conversations with his neighbours. Akenfield is a composite of real villages, and Blythe reworked what people said into polished monologues, so it reads as literature built on testimony. It remains a vivid record of rural England just before mechanisation changed it.