With tens of thousands of new books published in the UK each year, how do literary festival programmers choose? Meg Reid tells Louise Millar about the three twists of fate that led to biographer Ian Collins speaking about Ronald Blythe at the 2025 festival.
Ronald Blythe, who died aged 101 in 2023, is known to many of us as the writer and essayist who chronicled rural life in Suffolk. His best-known book, Akenfield: Portrait Of An English Village, a fictionalised account of agricultural life in the first half of the 20th century, inspired Peter Hall’s 1974 film Akenfield.
Festival director Meg Reid has been a longtime fan of Blythe’s The Time By The Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58. The detailed account of his life in the town includes a strange encounter with fellow writer EM Foster.
‘It gives you such a sense of the landscape, and stories of Suffolk,’ Meg says of the book. ‘Blythe brings the past alive.’
Yet, she reveals, it was only while shopping in Felixstowe last year that her interest in Blythe’s wider work really reawakened.
‘I saw a stack of Blythe’s books in the window of [secondhand bookshop] Treasure Chest,’ she says. ‘I bought them all, and started to re-engage with his writing.’
In a second twist of fate, when Ian Collins’ new biography, Blythe Spirit: The Remarkable Life Of Ronald Blythe, came to Meg’s attention, she remembered that the author had also written about James Dodds, an artist whom she had taught at school as a teenager. Already aware of Ian’s talent as a biographer, as a result, she was keen to read his new work, which tells his friend Blythe’s story for the first time.
‘Ian has had unparalleled access to Blythe’s letters and notebooks, and has had conversations over decades with him,’ she says. ‘In the biography, Blythe talks about the process of being a writer, how he came to it.’
And in a third twist of fate, Meg discovered that the festival has another unexpected connection to Ronald Blythe. ‘In The Time By The Sea, Blythe talks about going to a teashop in Aldeburgh,’ she says. ‘And it turns out it was run by the aunt of our festival treasurer, Jez!’
It was obviously all meant to be!
Ian Collins will discuss his new book with novelist Nicola Upson, on 29 June at 12pm, with a book signing to follow.