In her bestselling historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth, now being made into a film, Rosemary Sutcliff once wrote that Marcus, the hero, at his uncle’s house one evening thought the room ” … seemed to shimmer with a faint air of festival …”. A post I read today on a blog that points to this website – thank you – itself seemed to shimmer with the air of the Hay Festival which resident Lesley Arrowsmith loves. Her post, and one before it displaying her self-proclaimed new-found ability to post pictures too, set me thinking: how do we get The Hay Festival to attend more to dead writers whose books are very much alive? Especially Rosemary Sutcliff next year which is now also when the film of The Eagle of the Ninth will be released. Use a Zeppelin?
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 
Thank you for mentioning me! I’ve been away on holiday and only just got back and noticed this.
Dead authors and their books are something of a constant gripe amongst the second hand booksellers of Hay at Festival time. So many of the visitors are concentrating only on the authors they go to see at the Festival (which is great for their careers, of course) to the exclusion of other works of great literature. Not sure what we can do to change this, unless the booksellers organise a fringe festival for Dead Authors Only!
I don’t link to many blogs from my blog, trying to keep the whole thing Hay-related, but Rosemary Sutcliff was the first author to really get me fascinated by ancient history – especially her descriptions of what it felt like to live at that time. I also read the other ‘usual suspects’, Geoffrey Trease, Henry Treece, Mary Renault – but she was the best.
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