Ronald George Blythe (6 November 1922 – 14 January 2023) was a British writer, essayist and editor, best known for his work Akenfield (1969), an account of agricultural life in Suffolk from the turn of the century to the 1960s. He wrote a long-running and considerably praised weekly column in the Church Times entitled "Word from Wormingford". Early life and education Blythe was born in Acton, Suffolk, on 6 November 1922, the eldest of six children. His father, Albert, who had seen action in the First World War at Gallipoli and in Palestine, came from generations of East Anglian farmers and farm workers. His London-born mother, Matilda (née Elkins), had worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse during the war and passed on to her son her passion for books. Blythe could remember as a child seeing the sugar beet being farmed by men in army greatcoats and puttees. He was educated at St Peter's and St Gregory's school in Sudbury, Suffolk, and grew up exploring churches, architecture, plants and books. He left school at 14 but was, he said, "a chronic reader", immersing himself in French literature and writing poetry. Literary career Early cultural connections Blythe briefly served during the Second World War. Considered unfit for service by his superiors, he returned to East Anglia and spent the ten years up to 1954 working as a reference librarian in Colchester, where he founded the Colchester Literary Society. Through his work at the library he met Christine Nash when she was looking for the score of Idomeneo. She introduced Blythe to her husband, the artist John Nash, inviting him to their house, Bottengoms Farm, near Wormingford on the border of Essex and Suffolk, which he first visited in 1947. She later encouraged his ambitions to be a writer, finding him a small house on the Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh. Blythe lived briefly at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast (as recalled in his 2013 book The Time by the Sea) before moving to Debach. For three years in the late 1950s he worked for Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival, editing programmes and doing pieces of translation. He met E. M. Forster, was briefly involved with Patricia Highsmith, spent time with the Nashes, and was part of the Bohemian world associated with the artists of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End near Hadleigh, run by Cedric