Literary Suffolk

Any lover of literature who lives in Suffolk will find much of interest and probably some inspiration in 'Literary Suffolk' - for only £1! This is a booklet compiled and written by Anne Parry on behalf of the Suffolk Development Tourism Partnership and Suffolk Book League. There are entries on 100 authors and their works arranged in sections - writers who lived in Suffolk, writers who visited Suffolk, poets, writers on Suffolk landscape, novels with a Suffolk setting and children's writers. You will of course find entries on our greatest poet, George Crabbe, and our greatest visiting novelist, Dickens, and our notable Ipswich literary people commemorated by Ipswich Society Blue Plaques - V S Pritchett, Jean Ingelow and John Glyde - and lots of less obvious ones.

I hadn't realised that Ian McEwan attended Woolverstone Hall School, nor that Aylmer Maude, translator and friend of Tolstoy, was born in Ipswich. I should have liked an entry for W G Sebald, who was based in Norwich but had much to say about Suffolk in The Rings of Saturn and was undoubtedly one of Britain's finest recent writers. But there are so many revelations in such a small booklet that I'm sure many readers will be inspired to 'make their own literary pilgrimages,' as Anne Parry has said.

Copies are available from the Tourist Information Centre or from Jim Brown, Suffolk Tourism Partnership, on 0844 980 8510.

Neil Salmon