East Anglian special interest books and biographies

Sally Festing has always been interested in the links between man, art and landscape. After taking a degree in horticulture at Wye College, she lived in the US, working as a private secretary, in nursery gardens, and selling cosmetics on a university campus while bringing up a young family.

Back in England, she taught in secondary schools until she started writing. This led to journalism, poetry, radio plays, reviews and five books, of which two art biographies went into Penguin paperback. Skipping boundaries between art and science, she has written academic Garden History articles, profiles for the New Scientist and written for a decade in the Times Ed. supplements. She has also chaired Leicester Poetry Society and read at Poetry Wells-Next-the-Sea.

Brought up in Cambridge, Sally has had lifelong connections with East Anglia. She now lives in Manningtree where she runs a Poetry Society Stanza group, and in North Norfolk. A second poetry chapbook is coming out 2008/9.

Fishermen: A Community living from the Sea

Sally Festing does for fishermen what Ronald Blyth's Akenfield did for country working. This is a book about people whose life had a timeless quality which our machine age living can never hope to emulate.

Press Comments on First Edition

'Fishermen is a fine book ... It is a valuable book and one which very much needed to be written.' New Society

'Sally Festing knows how to talk to fishermen ... especially that resilient race that extracts its living off the north Norfolk coast ... it can take its place with Cobbett's Rural Rides as a chronicle of how Man and Nature coalesced in one particular place at one particular time.'The Times

The Story of Lavender

A unique and enchanting book recording the cultivation history, folklore, botany, literature and uses of one of our best-loved plants.

Review
'This unique and well-researched 133-paged book traces English lavender's history, cultivation and industry, and gives a very informative account of the lavender trade's rise and fall in the UK. The study contains so much original material, which is a delight to read, including detailed accounts of many of the original principle lavender growers and companies, set out in such a way as to include fascinating anecdotes and stories of many of the personalities involved.'

Gertrude Jekyll, Biography

Reviews

'Sally Festing's biography is as generous as it is meticulous ... Festing's own felicitous descriptions of some of the 400 Jekyll gardens, and in particular of Munstead, help to make the book as enjoyable as it is illuminating of the private life of a formidable, admirable woman.' Miranda Seymour in the Sunday Times

'A remarkable achievement ... This account gets about as close to prodding beneath the surface of the woman as any will.' Roy Strong in the Evening Standard

'Sally Festing sets out to give Gertrude Jekyll's work an extra dimension by increasing our knowledge of her family life and of her contradictory private and public character. She has done some thorough and original research'. Clayre Percy in the Spectator

Barbara Hepworth: A Life of Forms

Shortlisted by the Yorkshire Post for the best art biography of the year.

'Sally Festing has made a very good job of a formidable task .. I was moved by the basic truthfulness of her approach and her insights into the loneliness of a creative life.' Daily Telegraph

'It offers much information which cannot be found elsewhere and it also contains some insights that are compelling ... the brilliance, dignity and pain of this conflicted life shine through.' Sunday Times