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Graham Greene Birthplace Trust: Creative Writing Awards 2012

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To enter the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards, writers are invited to submitwritten texts under one or more of seven categories, and a panel of judges willdecide the best entries. Awards will be announced, and winningtexts may be displayed for the public to read at the Graham Greene International Festival in Berkhamsted (pictured above) (England, UK) in September 2012 and on theFestival's website.

Awardsare offered in the following categories:

(i) best prose fiction writer;

(ii) best prose thriller writer;

(iii) best prose travel writer;

(iv) best screenplay writer;

(v) best (prose or screenplay) writer underthe age of twenty-one years on 1st April 2012;

(vi) best (prose or screenplay) Berkhamstedianwriter (i.e. a writer who is a pupil at Berkhamsted School on 1st April 2012);

(vii) best (prose or screenplay) OldBerkhamstedian writer (i.e. a writer who is a former pupil at BerkhamstedSchool on 1st April 2012).

Prose writers must beginwith the following line, and continue from there:

‘A voice near his / her/ my foot said, “Got a cigarette?”….’

Screenplay writers mustembed this line somewhere in their dialogue:

‘A voice near his / her/ my foot said, “Got a cigarette?”….’

Therules and practices governing the Awards are:

(a) each entry shall be written mostly inthe English language and shall have a title; each prose entry shall be no morethan 800 words; each screenplay entry shall be written on no more than foursides of A4 paper in a normal font size (e.g. Times New Roman 11pt); each entryshall be a complete text and not an extract from a larger text;

(b) each entry shall be typed, shall besubmitted as a pdf file and attached to an e-mail message sent to the Awards' Secretary [e-mail: RGuy@berkhamstedschool.org ] bythe closing date, which is 1st April 2012;

(c) each entry must be original andunpublished, must be submitted under a specific category, and must have beenwritten by the person who submits the work;

(d) a writer may submit an entry in morethan one category, provided that the entry is different in each case;

(e) a writer must also supply full contactdetails, including real name, full postal address and telephone number;

(f) a writer who submits an entry incategory (v) or (vi) or (vii) must also present evidence of status andeligibility to the Awards' Secretary along with theentry;

(g) entries received after the closing dateshall not be considered for an Award;

(h) writers shall be responsible for theappropriateness, suitability, decency and legality of their own written entries,and neither the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust nor its judges nor any of itsmembers or associates shall be responsible for the content of such entries;

(i) an entry which is deemed to beinappropriate, unsuitable, obscene, offensive or illegal shall not beconsidered for an Award, and may be the subject of legal action;

(j) Awards shall be announced at the GrahamGreene International Festival in 2012;

(k) an Award shall be not made under aspecific category, if in the opinion of the judges there is no entry whichmerits an Award;

(l) the decisions of the judges shall befinal, and no correspondence shall be entered into.

Further information on and anyamendments concerning the Awards may be seen on one of the GGBT's Facebook pages,which may be accessed from the website, and here on the Festival ex-Director's Blog:http://grahamgreenefestival.blogspot.com/

The Awards will be judged byRebekah Lattin-Rawstrone, Creina Mansfield, William Ivory and Dermot Gilvary.

GGBT Creative Writing Awards 2011 & 2012

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Cathy Hogan (Best Screenplay 2011) with Lee Langley (right)

Fergal Casey (Best Thriller 2011) with Lee Langley (left)

Matthew Smith (Best Fiction 2011) with Prof Michael Brennan (left)

The starting points for the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards 2012 were announced at the Graham Greene International Festival 2011.

Prose writers must begin with the following line, and continue from there:

“A voice near his / her/ my foot said, 'Got a cigarette?'….”

Screenplay writers must embed this line somewhere in their dialogue:

“A voice near his / her/ my foot said, 'Got a cigarette?'….”

Whether working on prose or screenplay, writers should choose between the words "his / her / my".

The Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards 2012 are offered in the following categories:

(i) best prose fiction writer;

(ii) best prose thriller writer;

(iii) best prose travel writer;

(iv) best screenplay writer;

(v) best (prose or screenplay) writer under the age of twenty-one years on 1st April 2012;

(vi) best (prose or screenplay) Berkhamstedian writer (i.e. a writer who is a pupil at Berkhamsted School on 1st April 2012);

(vii) best (prose or screenplay) Old Berkhamstedian writer (i.e. a writer who is a former pupil at Berkhamsted School on 1st April 2012).

The closing dates for entries will be 1st April 2012. Each entry shall be written mostly in the English language and shall have a title. Each prose text shall be no more than 800 words; each screenplay text shall be written on no more than four sides of A4 paper in a normal font size (e.g. Times New Roman 11pt).

Full details and rules may be seen at:

http://www.grahamgreenefestival.org/Pages/awards.php

At the Festival 2011, prizes were presented by Prof Michael Brennan (University of Leeds, UK) and Lee Langley (screenwriter, The Tenth Man, USA, 1988) to the following winners of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards 2011:

Matthew Smith (above, lowest image) (Wimbledon, London, England, UK) for Best Fiction

Fergal Casey (above, middle image) (Ballinteer, County Dublin, Ireland) for Best Thriller

Cathy Hogan (above, top image) (Kilkenny & National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland) for Best Screenplay

Emily Beauchamp (Hertfordshire, England, UK) for Best Berkhamstedian.

Nathan Ellis (Oakham, Rutland, England, UK) won the award for Best Under 21 Writer, and his prize will be presented on a later date.

Creative Writing Awards 2011 & Writers' Workshop

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Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

William Ivory

The winners of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards for April 2011 are:

Best Fiction: Matthew Smith (Wimbledon, London, England, UK)

Best Thriller: Fergal Casey (Ballinteer, County Dublin, Ireland)

Best Screenplay: Cathy Hogan (Kilkenny & National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland)

Best Under 21 Writer: Nathan Ellis (Oakham, Rutland, England, UK)

Best Berkhamstedian: Emily Beauchamp (Hertfordshire, England, UK).

Prizes will be presented in Deans' Hall, Berkhamsted School (Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, UK) at the Graham Greene International Festival on the afternoon of Saturday 1st October 2011.

The judges would like to thank all the entrants --- from as near as Greene’s home town, Berkhamsted, and from as far away as Canada --- for their excellent efforts and fine writing. There were many interesting and individual texts, and a great range of styles and subject matter, allied to abundant enthusiasm and impressive commitment to the project. Although Awards were not made in the categories of Travel and Old Berkhamstedian, nevertheless the entries were a credit to the writers in all instances. In the category of Travel the entry from William Whyte (Great Chishill, Hertfordshire, England, UK) was commended by the judges.

The titles (or starting-points) for the Awards in April 2012 will be released at the Festival in October 2011, when there will be a joint Creative Writing Workshop in prose and screenplay writing, led by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone (above, top) and William Ivory (above, below). This course will include the professional writers' introductions to two disciplines (in which Graham Greene excelled), shared considerations of sample materials and the writers' guidance in an opportunity to write creatively in one of the genres.

The event will be completed by attendance at Lee Langley’s talk on “Traps and Escapes”. Lee Langley is an award-winning novelist and travel-writer. She wrote the screen adaptation of Graham Greene's The Tenth Man (USA, 1988), and she will talk about the pleasures and problems of adaptation and the lure of faraway places to writers of fiction. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone's first novel was Home (Social Disease, 2008), and she is currently working on her second. She teaches Creative Writing at City University (London) and The Bishopsgate Institute (London). She is a partner of Apis Books, an independent publishing company for shorter fiction, and she was the founder of the writers’ forum Tales of the Decongested.

William Ivory wrote the screenplays for Made in Dagenham (UK, 2010), which was nominated for a BAFTA Award, and Women in Love (BBC, 2011). He is a writer for television, film and stage. He is the author of A Thing Called Love (BBC, 2005) and The Sins for which he won The Edgar Allan Poe Award in New York presented by The Crime Writers Association of America for Best TV Drama Series, and he is the creator of The Invisibles (BBC1, 2007). In 2009 he was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Nottingham, UK.

Programme for Festival 2011

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The 14th Graham Greene International Festival
Thursday 29th September to Sunday 2nd October 2011
At various venues in Berkhamsted (England, UK)

Festival Director: Yan Christensen

Thursday 29th September 2011

16:30 – 18:00, An Event for Berkhamsted School’s Sixth Form, Old Hall (Berkhamsted School)

17:30 – 19:30, Social Gathering and Buffet Supper at The Gatsby restaurant

19:45 – 21:30, Film Night at The Rex Cinema
Brighton Rock
(UK, 2010; 111 mins; director, Rowan Joffé; starring Andrea Riseborough, Sam Riley, Helen Mirren; classification, 15)
Introduced by Rowan Joffé

Friday 30th September 2011

Talks at the Town Hall, Berkhamsted

9:30 – 10:30, Christian Hofferbert
'Godless Greene – Changing Extremes in Greene’s Work'

11:00 – 12:00, Professor François Gallix
'Graham Greene’s Books for Children'

14:15 – 15:15, Martin Jenkins
'At last, The Blue Plaque' – followed by
Tim Bentinck
'How Greene was My Childhood'

15:45 – 16:45, Julian Clapp
'Brighton Rock Locations'

19:30, Film Night at Civic Centre
Brighton Rock
(UK, 1947; 92 minutes; directed by John Boulting; starring Richard Attenborough and Carol Marsh; classification, PG)
With an introduction by Quentin Falk, who will lead a post-film discussion

Saturday 1st October 2011

Talks and Events in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School

Exhibition: Illustrations from Greene’s books for children and displays of winning entries in the Creative Writing Awards 2011

9:30 – 10:30, Professor Cedric Watts
'Brighton Rock, Janus and Proteous'

11:00 – 12:00, Professor Joyce Stavick
'The Not-so-Quiet Americans: University Students Speak Out as Greene Film Critics'

14:15 – 15:15, Professor Michael Brennan
'Faith and Authorship in the early Novels

15:45 – 16:45, Lee Langley
'Traps and Escapes'

18:15 – 18:30, Book Launch
Dermot Gilvary and Dr Darren Middleton present Dangerous Edges of Graham Greene (New York: Continuum, 2011)

18:30, Andrew Bourget
'Birthday Toast'

18:45 – 19:45, Professor Steve Chibnall
'Problems with Pinkie: Adapting Brighton Rock for the screen, 1947 and 2010'

20:00, The Bourget-Greene Gala Dinner in Old Hall
Followed by Ed Reardon: 'A Short Talk'

Saturday 1st October 2011: Alternative Event

9:30 – 16:30, Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone and William Ivory
A Creative Writing Workshop in Prose Fiction and Screenplay

GGBT’s Creative Writing Awards 2011
The prizes will be presented.

GGBT Creative Writing Awards 2012
Titles or starting points for stories, travel pieces and screenplays will be announced, and publicised on the Festival’s website, on the GGBT’s Facebook pages and on the Ex-Director’s Blog.

Sunday 2nd October 2011

9:00 – 9:45, David Pearce
Tour of Berkhamsted School

Talks in Newcroft in Berkhamsted School

10:00 – 11:00, Dr Bernard Ineichen
'Spies, Lies and Dangerous to Believe — espionage in the writings of Norman Lewis and Graham Greene'

11:30 – 12:30, Professor Neil Sinyard
‘"All writers are equal but some writers are more equal than others": some
reflections on links and contrasts between Graham Greene and George Orwell'

12:45 – 14:00, Farewell Lunch in Old Hall (Berkhamsted School)

Some biographical information about speakers and full details of events and tickets and may be read on the Festival’s website.

Michael Brennan and Lee Langley will speak at Festival 2011

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At the Graham Greene International Festival Michael G. Brennan (above, top) (Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of Leeds, UK) and the writer Lee Langley (above, below; photo, Daily Mail) will be the guest speakers in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (Berkhamsted, UK) on the afternoon of Saturday 1st October 2011.

Prof. Brennan will speak on “Faith and Authorship in the Early Novels” of Graham Greene. Recently he published Fictions, Faith and Authorship (Continuum, 2010), which is a comprehensive reconsideration of Greene’s exploration of faith, doubt, literary versatility and authorial identity in his fictions and other writings.

Award-winning novelist and travel-writer, Lee Langley will speak on “Traps and Escapes”, and will discuss the pleasures and problems of adaptation and the lure of faraway places to writers of fiction. She wrote the screen adaptation of Greene's The Tenth Man, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Prof. Brennan’s research interests include: (i) the writings in manuscript and print, literary patronage, and public careers of the Sidneys of Penshurst and the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke, of Wilton between 1500 and 1700; (ii) the writings of Graham Greene and in particular various aspects of religious faith in Greene’s fiction and his travel writings, his close and creative relationship with Evelyn Waugh, and the often polarised responses of literary biography to Greene’s career; and (iii) travel writings in manuscript and print between 1500 and 1700, especially relating to Western Europe and the Levant.

He welcomes enquiries from prospective research students who are interested in pursuing topics relating to Renaissance Studies, Graham Greene and Travel Writings.

Lee Langley is the author of several novels, including Changes of Address (1987), a largely autobiographical account of her childhood in India and the first in a loose trilogy of novels set in India. It was followed by Persistent Rumours (1992), which won the Writers' Guild Award (Best Fiction) and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book), and A House in Pondicherry (1995). Her novel, Distant Music (2001), spans six centuries in a narrative that begins on the Portuguese island of Madeira in the fifteenth century, and ends in London in the year 2000. Twice she has been short-listed for the Hawthornden Prize.

She has also written several film scripts and screenplays, including television adaptations of stories by Rumer Godden and Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance, as well as a play, Baggage.

Cathy Hogan wins Award for best fiction

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Cathy Hogan (above left), who comes from Kilkenny (Republic of Ireland), won the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Award for Best Fiction Writer 2010. She received her prize from the psychoanalyst and former England cricket captain, Michael Brearley OBE (above right) at the Graham Greene International Festival 2010, when a packed auditorium cheered her splendid writing. Her achievement is recognised in the newsletter (issue number eight) of the School of Humanities at the National University of Ireland, Galway (Republic of Ireland), where she is a third-year student on the BA with Creative Writing Programme.

Cathy's tale "The Second Carriage" is a story about sexual identity, as she introduces a thirty-year old who has been blind since birth, and who is returning to visit parents in the Republic of Ireland after a sex change from female to male. As if anticipating her child’s need for spiritual guidance, the mother has arranged for the priest to visit their home. However, her daughter --- who is now her son --- has lost the faith, and anticipates only difficulty in meeting ageing parents who remain fixed in twentieth century ways of thinking, as she/he sees them. The writer skilfully employs the telephone as a device to create tension and to suggest distance between parent and child.

The winners of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards 2010 were Cathy Hogan (best fiction), Susan Shemtob (best screenplay), Rebecca Barrow (best writer under 21 years of age), Sid Sagar (best Berkhamstedian) and Anne Chinneck (best Old Berkhamstedian). The prizes were presented by Michael Brearley and William Ivory, who wrote the screenplay for the popular film, Made in Dagenham (UK, 2010).

The starting point for all texts in the competition was: “A whistle blew, and the train trembled into movement....”, and the award-winning texts were displayed in the Exhibition in Deans' Hall, Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK), on Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd October 2010.

The closing date for submission of texts for the next round of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards is 1st April 2011. Full details of the competitions are available on the Trust’s website, from which you can also download a pdf file with the complete rules.

Susan Shemtob wins best screenplay award

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Susan Shemtob (above right) won the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Award for Best Screenplay 2010. She received her prize from William Ivory (above left) at the Graham Greene International Festival 2010, when a packed auditorium gave Susan a warm reception.

She wrote a lively screenplay in which she presented the funeral of a young man and other moments from present time, which were interwoven with past time and a violent murder on a railway train. Her text showed a keen appreciation of how the medium of screenplay (as opposed to a stage play) might work in images and cuts, as well as in dialogue and action.

All screenplays in the competition had to embed the following line in their work: “A whistle blew, and the train trembled into movement”, and the award-winning texts were displayed in the Exhibition in Deans' Hall, Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK), on Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd October 2010.

The other winners of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s inaugural Creative Writing Awards 2010 were Cathy Hogan (best fiction), Rebecca Barrow (best writer under 21 years), Sid Sagar (best Berkhamstedian) and Anne Chinneck (best Old Berkhamstedian).

The prizes were presented by William Ivory, who wrote the screenplay for the popular film Made in Dagenham (UK, 2010), and the psychoanalyst and former England cricket captain, Michael Brearley, OBE.

The closing date for submission of texts for the next round of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards is 1st April 2011. Full details of the competitions are available on the Trust’s website, from which you can also download a pdf file with the complete rules.

Sid Sagar is Best Berkhamstedian

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Sid Sagar (above right) won the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Award for Best Berkhamstedian Writer 2010. He received his prize from the psychoanalyst and former England cricket captain, Michael Brearley, OBE (above left), at the Graham Greene International Festival 2010, when a packed auditorium gave Sid an enthusiastic reception.

He wrote an exciting short story from the point of view of a man whose problems with money and alcohol lead him into bad company and the desperate remedy of acting as a hired assassin. Written in a modern and exciting style, the tale moves quickly to a conclusion, which reassures the reader with the suggestion that evil does not necessarily triumph.

The starting point for all texts in the competition was: “A whistle blew, and the train trembled into movement....”, and the award-winning texts were displayed in the Exhibition in Deans' Hall, Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK), on Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd October 2010.

The winners of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards 2010 were Cathy Hogan (best fiction), Susan Shemtob (best screenplay), Rebecca Barrow (best writer under 21 years), Sid Sagar (best Berkhamstedian) and Anne Chinneck (best Old Berkhamstedian). Prizes were presented by Michael Brearley and William Ivory, writer of the screenplay for the popular film Made in Dagenham (UK, 2010).

The closing date for submission of texts for the next round of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards is 1st April 2011. Full details of the competitions are available on the Trust’s website, from which you can also download a pdf file with the complete rules.

Graham Greene Birthplace Trust's Creative Writing Awards 2011

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If you are interested in creative writing, why not try your luck in a competition organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust?

Here are the titles or starting points for the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards 2011.

Prose writers must begin with the following line, and continue from there:
“Everybody in the world, so they say, has a double…”

Screenplay writers must embed this line somewhere in their dialogue:
“Everybody in the world, so they say, has a double.”

Your text must be written mostly in the English language, and it must be no more than 800 words long. The closing date for submission of texts is 1st April 2011. You may enter more than one text, if you wish. There are seven categories under which you may enter:

(i) best fiction writer
(ii) best thriller writer
(iii) best travel writer
(iv) best screenplay writer
(v) best writer under the age of twenty-one years on 1st April 2011
(vi) best Berkhamstedian writer (i.e. a writer who is a pupil at Berkhamsted School on 1st April 2011)
(vii) best Old Berkhamstedian writer (i.e. a writer who is a former pupil at Berkhamsted School on 1st April 2011).

Full details of the competitions are available on the Trust’s website, from which you can also download a pdf file with the complete rules. Entries will be welcome from writers all around the world.

The winners of the Awards 2011 will be announced on Saturday 1st October 2011 in Deans’ Hall (Berkhamsted School, UK, shown in the images above) at the Graham Greene International Festival.

There will also be one-day courses for aspiring prose fiction and screenplay writers at the Graham Greene International Festival 2011.

Programme change: Festival 2010

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Monica Ali is unwell, and regrets that she is unable to appear at the Graham Greene International Festival on Saturday 2nd October 2010. In her place Svetlana Dimcovic will speak about directing Greene's The Potting Shed at the Finborough Theatre, London.

William Ivory's "Made in Dagenham" lights up the silver screen

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William Ivory (lower photograph) wrote the screenplay for the film Made in Dagenham (top image), which was given its world première in Leicester Square (London, UK) last night. It was enthusiastically reviewed this morning in The Telegraph, The Guardian and the MailOnline.

The writer will lead a workshop for screenplay writers in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (Berkhamsted, UK) at the Graham Greene International Festival from 9.30am to 4.30pm on Saturday 2nd October 2010. This practical course should suit aspiring adult screenwriters of all ages. The event will include breaks for tea, coffee and lunch, and attendance at Michael Brearley’s talk, “A (second) Psychoanalyst looks at Graham Greene”.

A feature of William Ivory’s screenplay writing course will be a practical exercise to write film scenes drawn from the first chapter of Greene’s novel Brighton Rock, part one, section one: “Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him....” This exciting exercise will provide a link to Rowan Joffé’s illustrated talk “The Re-imagining of Brighton Rock” at the Festival at 11.30am on the following morning, Sunday 3rd October 2010.

William Ivory writes for television, film and stage. His recent projects include a film for the BBC based on D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.

The titles (or starting-points) for the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust's Creative Writing Awards in April 2011 will be released at the Festival 2010, when in addition to the screenplay workshop there will again be a prose workshop, which will be led by the fiction writer and academic, Creina Mansfield.

Lesley Sharp among the stars to perform at Festival

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Professional actresses and actors, Lesley Sharp (top photgraph), Eve Matheson (middle photograph), Jenny Quayle, Michael Palmer and Philip Battley, have been engaged by Dr. Joe Spence (lower photograph) to perform in rehearsed readings of extracts from Greene’s plays (mainly The Potting Shed and The Complaisant Lover) at the Graham Greene International Festival in the Civic Centre, Berkhamsted (UK), on the evening of Friday 1st October 2010.

Dr. Spence will introduce and conclude the event with a talk on “In and Beyond The Living Room: The Art and Scope of Graham Greene, Dramatist”.

Dr. Spence has been the Master of Dulwich College since September 2009. He was previously Master in College at Eton College and headmaster of Oakham School. He is an historian and playwright. He writes on nineteenth and twentieth century Irish literary and cultural history, and has had two plays (Gogol’s Gamblers, Pleasance Edinburgh and BAC, and Descent, Pleasance Edinburgh and King’s Head, Islington) produced professionally. His interest in the plays of Graham Greene has been long-standing, and grew out of a fascination with the playwrights of the 1950s and ‘60s (such as Greene, John Whiting, Enid Bagnold and Rodney Ackland) who were ignored in the era of the Angry Young Men.

The actresses and actors, who will appear at the Festival subject to their availabilities, began rehearsals with Dr. Spence in the third week of August 2010.

Graham Greene’s The Potting Shed will be revived at the Finborough Theatre (Earl’s Court, London, UK) on dates between 12th and 27th September 2010.

Rowan Joffé re-imagines "Brighton Rock" in new film

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At the Graham Greene International Festival in Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK) at 11.30am on Sunday 3rd October 2010 the award-winning writer and director Rowan Joffé will give an illustrated talk on “The Re-imagining of Brighton Rock”, when he will speak about how he adapted Greene’s novel Brighton Rock to create a new film. While emphasising that he has not remade the 1947 film, he will address two main questions:

(i) Why re-imagine the novel when such a great film has already been made?
(ii) Why set the film in 1964?

The talk will be illustrated by excerpts from the film and by still photography.

Rowan Joffé wrote the screenplay for the film The American (starring George Clooney, directed by Anton Corbjin). He directed the television drama The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (written by Simon Block for Talkback Thames / Channel 4), for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Fiction Director 2009 and the BAFTA Award for Best Actor. He wrote the screenplays for the 28 Days Later sequel (directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo) and Last Resort (directed by Pawel Pawlikowski). He was the writer and director of the television drama Secret Life (starring Matthew MacFadyen for Channel 4 / Kudos Productions). He wrote Turkish Delight, an afternoon play for BBC1, for which he won the Royal Television Society Best Drama Award 2003. He also wrote Gas Attack, a television drama for Channel 4 / Hart Ryan in 2001. He was nominated for BAFTA’s Best New Writer in 2002 and for Best Single Drama at the Broadcast Awards 2002. He won the Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature at the Edinburgh Festival 2001. Rowan Joffé's film of Brighton Rock will have its première at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2010.

Prof. Neil Sinyard is unfortunately indisposed after an accident in July, and his talk, scheduled for 11.30am on Sunday 3rd October 2010, is cancelled. Trustees and friends will want to wish Prof. Sinyard a speedy recovery.

Four Events celebrate Greene and Film at Festival 2010

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The brilliance of Graham Greene’s cinematic writing will be celebrated at four events at the forthcoming Graham Greene International Festival 2010.

(1) The Ministry of Fear (classification: PG) will be screened on the evening of Thursday 30th September at The Rex, Berkhamsted’s beautiful art deco cinema. It will be introduced by Mike Hill, who was director of the Festival from 2005 to 2007. With Jon Wise, he is co-author of a bibliographical and contextual reference book, The Writings of Graham Greene: A Reader’s Guide.

The film is based upon Greene’s 1943 novel of the same name, and it tells the story of a man who, after his release from a mental asylum, finds himself caught up in an international spy ring in London during the Blitz. After guessing the weight of a cake at a fair, he is pursued by foreign agents and incriminated for murder. The film was directed by Fritz Lang, starred Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds, and was released in the USA in 1944. It is renowned as a “film noir”, and runs for eighty-six minutes. The original music was composed by Miklos Rozsa and Victor Young.

(2) At the Town Hall, Berkhamsted (Hertfordshire, UK), on the afternoon of Friday 1st October 2010 Mike Hill will give a talk on "Greene and Hitchcock".

The speaker is interested in the superficial biographical dissimilarities between Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock, and also a number of similarities, and he sees the parallels between their respective bodies of work. These include their use of autobiographical detail, their willingness to experiment, and their late return to their roots. He considers that their artistic preoccupations were often remarkably similar—an interest in dreams, an involvement with the spy thriller, a recognition of the fragility of civilisation, a serious investigation of matters Catholic, and the development of “ingenious melodramatic situations”. He also sees a cinematic connection between the two and possible influence between their works, and he is aware of Greene’s criticism of Hitchcock’s films in the 1930s and his later lack of admiration for Hitchcock’s work. He regrets the resultant lack of artistic cooperation between the two.

(3) On the evening of Saturday 2nd October 2010 in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK) Prof. Thomas O’Connor will give an illustrated talk titled “Double Exposure: Capturing Greene on Film”.

Prof. O'Connor teaches at the School of Media Arts and Design at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA. He has written and produced over fifty documentaries and teleplays for broadcast, several of which have won major awards. He has travelled widely for his productions — throughout Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and Mexico. His film Fatima was the first nationwide documentary shown in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. During a NASA fellowship in 1998, he wrote and produced a documentary on the first manned lunar landing. His feature screenplay titled Fools of Time has been optioned by a Los Angeles production company. Currently he is working on a documentary about Graham Greene. He is pictured above at the author’s grave in Vevey, Switzerland.

(4) Film enthusiasts will also look forward to an illustrated talk by Rowan Joffé, the writer and director of Brighton Rock (2010). On the morning of Sunday 3rd October 2010 in Newcroft Lecture Theatre, Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK) he will speak about “The Re-imagining of Brighton Rock”, and he will show some clips from his film along with still photography. Rowan Joffé's talk replaces the originally advertised talk by Prof. Neil Sinyard, who is indisposed.

Medieval theology in Greene's Catholic novels

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At the Graham Greene International Festival on Friday 1st October 2010 at 2.15pm in the Town Hall, Berkhamsted (Hertfordshire, UK), Dr. Frances McCormack (National University of Ireland, Galway) (pictured in the top photograph) will discuss aspects of medieval theology, as she discovers them in one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers in the English language.

Her title is “Nothing but a regret: compunction and shame in the Catholic novels of Graham Greene”.

She will explain the medieval theological doctrine of compunction, which was a monastic doctrine of a sorrow and regret which would bring one closer to God. According to the theological writers of the time, it had four sources: (i) awareness of one's own sins, (ii) contemplation of heaven, (iii) fear of damnation, and (iv) sorrow for the sins of others. She will argue that this doctrine informs Greene's Catholic writings, motivating his characters to the sense of regret and shame which they so often feel. She will examine this compunction as a motivational force in the lives of both protagonists and antagonists in the Catholic novels.

Dr. McCormack is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Chaucer and the Culture of Dissent (2007), and she was the lexicographical consultant for Terence Patrick Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English (2nd ed.). In addition to her enthusiasm for Chaucer, her research interests include Old and Middle English literature, political, religious and devotional literature of those eras, mystical writing, anticlericalism, penitential writings and heresy.

At the Festival on the afternoon of Saturday 2nd October 2010 in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), Monica Ali (photographed by John Follain, above) will speak about “My Writing and Graham Greene”. She wrote the introduction to one of Greene’s great Catholic novels, The End of the Affair, in Vintage’s centenary edition, 2004. She is the author of Brick Lane amongst other texts, and she has lectured at Columbia University, New York.

On 7th October 2010 Vintage Classics will release a new edition of Greene’s most famous Catholic novel, The Power and the Glory (1940), and the volume will be enhanced by notes for reading groups.

Tim Butcher retreads Greene's Journey Without Maps

2010-08-30T18:11:00.020+01:00

On 2nd September 2010 Vintage Classics will publish a new edition of Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps (1936) with a foreword by Tim Butcher (above) and an introduction by Paul Theroux. Copies will be available for purchase at the bookstall at the Graham Greene International Festival in Berkhamsted (UK) in October 2010.

In 1935 Greene set off to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar West African republic founded for released slaves. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast at Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, the writer came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by Western colonisation. In A Preface to Greene (Longman, 1997) Prof. Cedric Watts describes Greene's travel book Journey Without Maps as “interesting, perceptive, vivid, odd”, and he notes “the intense and discriminating interest that Greene took in the diversity of Africans whom he encountered, [and] particularly his considerate treatment of the various carriers and his compassionate concern for the sufferings he observed”.

Tim Butcher has been following Greene's trail in West Africa, and on the morning of Saturday 2nd October 2010 at the Festival he will give the annual talk on New Research on Graham Greene. His title will be “Chasing The Devil – How Greene Lost His Heart To West Africa”. More details of his talk appear on the Blog posted on 26th May 2010 and on the Festival website.

Formerly a correspondent with The Daily Telegraph, Mr. Butcher’s most recent writing includes Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart (2007) and Chasing the Devil (to be published in 2010). Blood River is a compelling account of an African country now virtually inaccessible to the outside world in what is perhaps one of the most daring and adventurous journeys a journalist has made in recent years.

On 7th October 2010 Vintage Classics will also release a new edition of Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940) with notes for reading groups.

Jeremy Lewis revives Shades of Greene

2010-08-30T16:25:00.017+01:00

Jeremy Lewis will discuss his new book Shades of Greene at the Graham Greene International Festival in the Town Hall, Berkhamsted (UK), on the morning of Friday 1st October 2010.

In the early years of the last century, two brothers, Charles and Edward Greene, settled in Berkhamsted, a small country town thirty miles from London. There they were to found a remarkable dynasty --- fathering twelve children between them --- each of whom were to lead varied, well-documented and extraordinary lives. This book explores for the first time this generation of the Greene family in colourful detail --- their relationships and shared history, and their lives --- as explorers, writers, doctors, spies, politicians and much more. There is Graham, one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century; Hugh, The Daily Telegraph's Berlin correspondent in the years leading up to World War Two, and later Director-General of the BBC; Raymond, a brilliant mountaineer and medical man who took part in the Everest expedition in 1933; their sister Elisabeth, an MI6 agent, enlisting family and friends into the secret service; cousin Ben, a pacifist and Labour Party activist who was interned in 1940 at the same time as Oswald Mosley; his sister, Barbara, who spent the war in Germany; their younger brother Felix, a pioneer of radio journalism and apologist for Communist China, who moved to a commune in California with his cousin Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley; and, Herbert, the black sheep of the family, fantasist and amateur spy. Interlacing biography, history, high adventure and scenes from literary life, Shades of Greene provides a riveting insight into the self-confident, enterprising, upper middle-class English world that flourished between the 1920s and the 1970s --- and into a truly remarkable tribe.

Jeremy Lewis has worked in publishing for much of his life after leaving Trinity College, Dublin, in 1965, and was a director of Chatto & Windus for ten years. He has been a freelance writer and editor since 1989. The deputy editor of the London Magazine from 1990 to 1994, he has been commissioning editor of The Oldie since 1997, and editor-at-large of the Literary Review since 2004. He has written three volumes of autobiography, Playing for Time, Kindred Spirits and Grub Street Irregular, and edited an anthology, The Chatto Book of Office Life. His authorised biography of Cyril Connolly was published by Jonathan Cape in 1997, and a life of Tobias Smollett in 2003; Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane was published by Viking in 2005. A committee member of the R.S. Surtees Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is currently researching a biography of David Astor of The Observer, to be published by Jonathan Cape.

Shades of Greene was published on 5th August 2010 by Jonathan Cape, and will be available for purchase at the Festival bookstall.

Creative Writing Award Winners, April 2010

2010-08-30T13:33:00.020+01:00

The winners of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards for April 2010 are:

Best Fiction: Cathy Hogan (Kilkenny, Ireland)

Best Screenplay: Susan Shemtob (Hertfordshire, England)

Best Under 21 Writer: Rebecca Barrow (Wiltshire, England)

Best Berkhamstedian: Sid Sagar (Hertfordshire, England)

Best Old Berkhamstedian: Anne Chinneck (Devon, England)

Prizes will be presented by the guest speakers, Michael Brearley OBE and Monica Ali, at the Graham Greene International Festival in Deans' Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK) on the afternoon of Saturday 2nd October 2010.

The judges would like to thank all the entrants for their excellent efforts and fine writing. There were many interesting and individual texts, and a great range of styles and subject matter, allied to abundant enthusiasm and impressive commitment to the project. Although Awards were not made in the categories of Travel and Thriller writing, nevertheless the entries were a credit to the writers in all instances.

The titles (or starting-points) for the Awards in April 2011 will be released at the Festival in October 2010, when there will again be Creative Writing Workshops in prose and screenplay writing, this year to be led by Creina Mansfield and William Ivory. These will be practical one-day courses which should suit aspiring adult writers of all ages. Details appear on the Blog posted on 24th July 2010 and on the Festival website.

One feature of William Ivory’s screenplay writing course will be a practical exercise to write film scenes drawn from the first chapter of Greene’s novel Brighton Rock, part one, section one: “Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him....” This exercise will provide a link to Rowan Joffé’s illustrated talk “The Re-imagining of Brighton Rock”, when he will talk about his new film (starring Sam Riley, Andrea Riseborough and Helen Mirren) at the Festival at 11.30am on the following morning, Sunday 3rd October 2010.

Prof. Neil Sinyard forced to cancel Festival talk

2010-08-28T17:40:00.015+01:00

Prof. Neil Sinyard (University of Hull, UK) is unfortunately indisposed after an accident, and his talk, scheduled for 11.30am on Sunday 3rd October 2010 at the Graham Greene International Festival, is cancelled. His place will be taken by Rowan Joffé, the writer and director of the new film of Brighton Rock (2010).

Trustees and Friends will want to wish Prof. Sinyard a speedy recovery.

Slightly Foxed issues limited edition of Graham Greene's "A Sort of Life"

2010-08-19T23:44:00.013+01:00

Graham Greene’s A Sort of Life will be published by Slightly Foxed in a new, limited edition of 2,000 copies as a pocket hardback with a Preface by Frances Donnelly on 2nd September 2010.

A Sort of Life was originally published in 1971, and is the first of two autobiographical texts by Graham Greene, who once said that writing this memoir of his early years was in the nature of a psychoanalysis: “I made a long journey through time and I was one of my characters.”

Slightly Foxed tells us: “Certainly the younger self that emerges is as complex and intriguing as any of those he created in his novels. Greene grew up in Berkhamsted among a large colony of Greenes, and he attended Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster. As it turned out, the conflicting loyalties this produced, combined with the secrecy and subterfuge encouraged by the school’s puritanical regime, were the perfect grounding for the spy - and the novelist - he was to become. But the price was high. By the time he was out of his teens he had had what would now be called a nervous breakdown, undergone psychoanalysis – which was unusual for the 1920s – and become addicted to playing Russian roulette with his brother’s revolver.

“A Sort of Life, first published in 1971, takes Greene through Oxford, the early years of marriage and his conversion to Catholicism, to the point where he recklessly gives up his first Fleet Street job as a sub-editor on The Times in order to write full-time. What marked Greene out above all else was his utter determination to pursue his craft and there can be no more fascinating or illuminating account of what it takes to become a writer.”

For more information about Slightly Foxed and/or to see a copy of the latest Issue, please contact Steph Allen by telephone on 0044-(0)20 7549 2121/2111 or by e-mail: stephanieallen@foxedquarterly.com

Michael Brearley OBE will discuss Graham Greene’s second autobiography Ways of Escape (1980), when he talks to the Graham Greene International Festival in Deans’ Hall (Berkhamsted School, Hertfordshire, UK) on the afternoon of Saturday 2nd October 2010. His title will be “A (second) Psychoanalyst looks at Graham Greene”. Michael Brearley was President of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and formerly he was England’s cricket captain and the President of the Marylebone Cricket Club. He is the author of The Art of Captaincy (1985) and Phoenix from the Ashes: Story of the England-Australia Series, 1981 (1982).

Creative Writing Awards & Workshops

2010-07-24T17:11:00.021+01:00

The judges of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust's Creative Writing Awards 2010 would like to thank all the entrants for their excellent efforts and fine writing. There were many interesting and individual texts, and a great range of styles and subject matter, allied to abundant enthusiasm and impressive commitment to the project. The entries were a credit to the writers in all instances.

The winners of the Awards will receive their prizes at the Graham Greene International Festival in Deans' Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK) on the afternoon of Saturday 2nd October 2010.

The judges are keen to encourage the authors to continue with their writing, and hope that they --- and other writers --- will enter the competitions next year. The titles for the Awards in 2011 will be released at the Festival in 2010.

At the Festival in 2010 there will again be Creative Writing Workshops. These are practical one-day courses which should suit aspiring adult writers of all ages.

The prose workshop will be taught by Creina Mansfield (Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester, UK). She is the author of My Nutty Neighbours (2006), It Wasn't Me (2001), My Nasty Neighbours (1995), Cherokee (1994) and other titles for young children. She is now researching for a Ph.D. on narratological theories and Greene’s The Quiet American.

The screenplay workshop will be led William Ivory, who writes for television, film and stage. He is the author of the screenplays for Women in Love (BBC, 2010), A Thing Called Love (BBC, 2005) and The Sins, for which he won The Edgar Allan Poe Award in New York presented by the Mystery Writers of America for Best TV Drama Series in 2002. His stage play Bomber’s Moon was given its première performances at the Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham (UK) in 2010. He created The Invisibles (BBC1, 2007). In 2009 he was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Nottingham, UK.

Chris Hull writes to "The Times" about Cuba

2010-05-31T12:57:00.019+01:00

Dr. Chris Hull (University of Nottingham, UK), who gave the talk on New Research at the Graham Greene International Festival 2009 and is an expert on the background to Our Man in Havana, had a letter published in The Times (London) on 31/05/10.

He has been awarded a British Studies Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) in order to study the Graham Greene Collection. He is one of two guest speakers at the Graham Greene International Festival 2009 to be honoured in this way, and his one-month residency at Austin will be undertaken between June 2010 and August 2011. His research interest was sumamrised in a blog post on 12th May 2010.

At the Festival 2009 Dr. Hull spoke on “Prophecy and Comedy in Havana: Greene’s ‘entertainment’ and the reality of British diplomacy in Cuba”, and his talk was summarised in the blog post on 22nd November 2009.

Tim Butcher pronounces the last rites on an iconic hotel

2010-05-26T00:45:00.014+01:00

The novels of Graham Greene are set in difficult places, at difficult times. His characters wrestle with moral dilemmas in steamy tropical cities, such as Saigon, Havana, Port-au-Prince and elsewhere. He brilliantly evoked atmosphere in settings such as hotels, bars, cafés, opium dens and brothels. Greene conjured a world so convincing and distinctive that critics and readers have called it "Greeneland".

Tim Butcher (above) has been following Greene's trail in West Africa, but there was real disappointment when he went in search of one of the writer's favourite haunts, the City Hotel (top photograph in 2002; middle photograph in 1960s), which the author wrote about in Journey Without Maps (1936) and used as the Bedford Hotel in The Heart of the Matter (1948). Click here to read Tim Butcher’s article on the BBC website, here to listen to his broadcast on Saturday 22nd May 2010 on BBC Radio 4’s “From Our Own Correspondent”, and here to download the podcast.

On the morning of Saturday 2nd October 2010 at the Graham Greene International Festival Tim Butcher will give the annual talk on New Research on Graham Greene, and his title will be “Chasing The Devil – How Greene Lost His Heart To West Africa”. Formerly a correspondent with The Daily Telegraph, Mr. Butcher’s most recent writing includes Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart (2007) and Chasing the Devil (to be published in 2010).

On the evening of the same day at the Festival 2010 the BBC’s senior foreign correspondent Humphrey Hawksley, who has also been following Greene’s trail in West Africa, will speak after the Buffet Supper on the title “Journey Without Maps”. Mr. Hawksley’s most recently published book is Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About The Vote? (Macmillan, 2009).

Humphrey Hawksley and Michael Portillo examine democracy

2010-05-18T17:36:00.008+01:00

The BBC's senior foreign correspondent, Humphrey Hawksley, will speak to the Graham Greene International Festival after the dinner at 8.00pm on Saturday 2nd October 2010 in Old Hall, Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK). His title will be “Journey Without Maps”, and he may refer to his investigative reporting in West Africa on the footsteps of Graham Greene over seventy years after our author travelled in Liberia.

Mr. Hawksley’s most recent book titled Democracy Kills: What's So Good About Having the Vote? (Macmillan, 2009) carries the following text on its cover: “The mantra in our Western society is that democracy equals freedom and prosperity. But are we in fact imposing our free-market democracy with the same arrogance that colonial missionaries claimed they were civilizing poor natives a century ago? Is perhaps democracy a fig-leaf to protect strategic interests and access economic markets? Or is it simply that no one has yet had a better idea?

“In his urgent, powerful and engaging new book, acclaimed BBC foreign correspondent Humphrey Hawksley argues that, in some cases, attempts to introduce democracy lead to bloodshed, poverty and disease. He questions whether democracy, far from setting us free, might actually kill us, and, if that’s the case, [he asks] what should we do about it.”

In addition to Humphrey Hawksley’s thoughts on the subject, you can enjoy a series of three forty-five minute discussions being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 under the title “Democracy on Trial” and presented by Michael Portillo, who discusses the development of democracy over 2,500 years. This morning the BBC broadcast the second programme in the series, which you can hear again if you click here. The facility to listen online to this episode will be available for seven days until 25th May 2010.

Humphrey Hawksley’s recent films for television include "Bitter Sweet" and "Old Man Atom". He also wrote Security Breach (2008), The Third World War (2003), Red Spirit (2001), Dragon Fire (2000), Ceremony of Innocence (1999), Absolute Measures (1999) and other texts.

William Ivory's latest play at Lakeside, Nottingham

2010-05-17T01:17:00.007+01:00

William Ivory’s latest play Bomber’s Moon is being played at the Lakeside Theatre in the University of Nottingham (UK), until Saturday 22nd May 2010.

As a very young man, the main character, Jimmy, had been a rear gunner serving with Bomber Command during World War Two. However, we see him mostly in the later stages of his life, as his health is failing and he rarely moves from his chair. He is visited by a carer, who administers his many medicines. In their conversations they explore matters such as sickness, ageing, religious belief and death. The play also moves back in time to demonstrate the heroism and comradeship of airmen such as Jimmy, who faced death and coped with fear and the loss of companions on a daily basis during wartime action.

The author writes for television, film and stage. His recent projects include a film for the BBC based on D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. In 2007 he created The Invisibles, which starred Warren Clarke, Anthony Head and Jenny Agutter, and was screened on BBC1 in the following year. His seven-part series The Sins starred Peter Postlethwaite and Geraldine James, was nominated for a BAFTA award, and won The Edgar Allan Poe Award presented in New York by the Mystery Writers of America for Best TV Drama Series in 2002. In 2009 he was awarded the degree of honorary D.Litt. by the University of Nottingham.

William Ivory will lead a workshop for screenplay writers in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (Berkhamsted, UK) at the Graham Greene International Festival from 9.30am to 4.30pm on Saturday 2nd October 2010. This practical course should suit aspiring adult screenwriters of all ages. While there will be a certain amount of overlap with the teaching material offered at the Festival 2009, there will be much new material as well. The event will include breaks for tea, coffee and lunch, and attendance at Michael Brearley’s talk, “A (second) Psychoanalyst looks at Graham Greene”.

Full details of the programme are available on the Festival’s website. The running of the Workshop will depend upon there being a sufficient number of advance bookings received by the Festival Secretary by Friday 24th September 2010.

Dr. Chris Hull to study Greene at Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas

2010-05-12T00:29:00.011+01:00

Dr. Chris Hull (University of Nottingham, UK) has been awarded a British Studies Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) in order to study the Graham Greene Collection.

He is one of two guest speakers at the Graham Greene International Festival 2009 to be honoured in this way, and his one-month residency at Austin will be undertaken between June 2010 and August 2011.

Despite the fact that Latin America was the setting for half of Graham Greene’s foreign-based novels, there has been little investigation into the writer’s representation and views of each country’s politics and wider inter-American relations. Taking a predominantly political and historical rather than literary approach, Dr. Hull will analyse Greene’s Cold War Latin American novels and assorted correspondence related to the countries, where these works were set. He will focus on Our Man in Havana (Batista’s Cuba), The Comedians (Papa Doc’s Haiti) and The Honorary Consul (Argentine/Paraguayan dictatorship). His cross-disciplinary methodology will also engage with the novelist’s views on dictatorship across the political spectrum, from Fulgencio Batista, François Duvalier and Alfredo Stroessner on the Right, to Fidel Castro on the Left. It is possible that this project may widen to include study of The Quiet American, another key Cold War novel, and one in which Greene proved to be remarkably prescient about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Such research could also encompass the 1984 travelogue Getting to Know the General in order to analyse Greene’s friendship with the maverick socialist dictator of Panama, Omar Torrijos.

At the Festival 2009 Dr. Hull gave the first annual talk under the heading of New Research on Graham Greene. His title was “Prophecy and Comedy in Havana: Greene’s ‘entertainment’ and the reality of British diplomacy in Cuba”, and his talk is summarised in the blog post on 22nd November 2009.

Prof. François Gallix wins research grant at University of Texas at Austin

2010-05-11T23:51:00.014+01:00

Prof. François Gallix (University of the Sorbonne, Paris) is one of two guest speakers at the Graham Greene International Festival 2009 who has been awarded a research fellowship at the Harry Ramsom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) in order to study the Graham Greene Collection.

So that he may complete his study of the centre’s manuscripts, letters and books concerning Greene and “The Empty Chair”, Prof. Gallix has been granted a one-month fellowship in the summer of 2010. In July 2009 the announcement of his discovery of this unfinished and unpublished manuscript, which was written when the author was only twenty-two years old, inspired a great deal of scholarly and public interest. His revelation led to extensive coverage on the BBC and in local, national and international media. Prof. Gallix’s work is important, because it breaks new ground in the study of the Greene’s life and work, because it enhances existing scholarship and reading, and because there is great interest in the writer within and beyond the academic community, as one may see from the extent of current reading of Greene and the extent of scholarly work on his writing and life.

A regular, respected and popular guest at the Festival, Prof. Gallix gave a conference paper at the Festival 2008 on “The Riddles of Graham Greene: Brighton Rock as a literary Catholic detective story”. In 2009 he delivered a short talk in a talk entitled “The Discovery of ‘The Empty Chair’” in which he explained his progress so far in preparation of the novella for serialisation in Strand magazine. His talk was summarised in a blog post on 1st November 2009. Given the significance of his work and the intensity of interest which it has aroused, Prof. Gallix will speak again to the Festival on 1st October 2010 on the title “Graham Greene’s Unpublished Material”.

Attractions at the Festival 2010

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Michael Brearley (psychoanalyst and former England cricket captain), Monica Ali (author of Brick Lane; author of the introduction to Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, Vintage, 2004; lecturer at Columbia University, New York; photographed by John Follain above), Tim Butcher (formerly Middle East correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, and author of Blood River) and Humphrey Hawksley (senior BBC Foreign Correspondent, and author of Democracy Kills; top photograph) will be among the distinguished speakers at the next Graham Greene International Festival to be held at the writer's birthplace in Berkhamsted (Hertfordshire, England, UK) for four days from Thursday 30th September to Sunday 3rd October 2010.

The international dimension will be enhanced by the visits of Prof. François Gallix (University of the Sorbonne, Paris), Prof. Thomas O’Connor (James Madison University, Harrisonburg, USA) and Dr. Frances McCormack (National University of Ireland, Galway).

Amongst other attractions there will be dramatised readings from plays by Greene directed by Dr. Joe Spence (Master of Dulwich College), and the film of The Ministry of Fear (directed by Fritz Lang, USA, 1944) will be screened at The Rex Cinema in Berkhamsted.

Full details of the programme and tickets will be published soon.

Acknowledgements

2010-04-28T17:01:00.020+01:00

In the preparation of this blog, I should like to acknowledge the great help received from three invaluable sources:

(i) Ian Garrett whose company iGDesign is responsible for the website of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust and whose e-mail address is ian@igdesign.co.uk

(ii) Kevin Slingsby who is Head of Information and Communication Technology at Oakham School (Rutland, UK), and

(iii) Mark Steed who is Principal of Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK), which, as Graham Greene's old school, hosts many events at the Graham Greene International Festival.

The next Festival will be held in Berkhamsted (England, UK) from Thursday 30th September to Sunday 3rd October 2010. The programme is now complete, and details will be announced soon.

Brief summaries and images of the events in the Festival 2009 may be seen in previous entries on this blog.

Prof. Neil Sinyard remembers "The Tenth Man"

2010-04-27T03:09:00.016+01:00

At the Graham Greene International Festival in Deans' Hall, Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, England, UK) on the morning of Sunday 4th October 2009 Prof. Neil Sinyard brought down the curtain on the twelfth Festival, when he gave yet another in a series of witty and erudite talks illustrated by film. On this occasion his theme was "Forgotten Memories and the Mystery of The Tenth Man".

In 1937, Prof. Sinyard recalled, Greene had an idea for a film in which a rich man offered to give his entire wealth and possessions to anyone who would take his place at an execution. In 1944 the idea became a short novel, which he sold to MGM. Forty-one years later the same story was sold to an American publisher, who liked the tale so much that it was published in 1985. It was also filmed for television three years later in a version which starred Anthony Hopkins, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Derek Jacobi, and which earned three Golden Globe Awards and an Emmy for Derek Jacobi.

Prof. Sinyard taught in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Hull (England, UK). His many publications include Graham Greene: A Literary Life (2003), Jack Clayton (2000), Clint Eastwood (1995), Silent Movies (1995), Mel Gibson (1993), Marilyn (1992), Classic Movies (1988), Films of Steven Spielberg (1987), Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation (1986) and Journey Down Sunset Boulevard: Films of Billy Wilder (1979).

After his talk the Trustees, friends and guests gathered in Berkhamsted School's Old Hall for the Farewell Lunch, when the chairman of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, Giles Clark, thanked everyone for their work and support, hoped to see them next year and wished them "Bon Voyage".

David Pearce meets Dr. Fischer of Geneva

2010-04-27T02:50:00.014+01:00

At the Graham Greene International Festival in Deans' Hall, Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, England, UK) on the morning of Sunday 4th October 2009 David Pearce gave a characteristically entertaining and enlightening talk on "Dr. Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party and coming to terms with terrorism".

In this novel, argued David Pearce, Greene writes a story which is compact, which has great economy and composure. It is a mature statement from the writer, whose daughter Caroline was present at the moment of creation, namely a dinner on Christmas Eve with grandsons there too. The plot is simple, uncluttered and static, yet ideas twist and turn. The author recycles and reinvents everything: names, characters, situations. It is a love story, but also a tale of loneliness and emptiness. The thought is offered that, if love and benevolence are taken away, there is nothing to choose between God and Satan. The final joke is that death may provide a respite, yet we are frightened of it. The last enemy, however, is not death; it is undeath, not being able to remove oneself from the nightmare. There is infinite longing in this novel: it celebrates love and hope; it is witty and perceptive, but never sentimental and it offers the possibility of happiness. David Pearce added that, if he were still an English master at Berkhamsted School, he would make this book compulsory reading.

Prof. Cedric Watts (University of Sussex, UK), author of A Preface to Greene (Longman, 1997) and a regular guest speaker at Festivals, rose from his place in Deans’ Hall to tell the audience that in the light of David’s talk he needed to rewrite his own book!

David Pearce is a Trustee and co-founder of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, and was Festival director for four years.

Karas' zither music flavours Austrian Dinner in Heart of Greeneland

2010-04-27T02:19:00.020+01:00

At the Graham Greene International Festival on the evening of Saturday 3rd October 2009 the guests at the Austrian Dinner in Old Hall at Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, England, UK) were treated to Wiener Schnitzel, Sachertorte and a selection of Austrian wines. Dinner was followed by a selection of Anton Karas' music for the film of The Third Man (directed by Carol Reed, UK, 1949) played on the zither by Cornelia Mayer (above) and introduced by the film historian Dr. Brigitte Timmermann.

The Festival director, Dermot Gilvary, welcomed the Deputy Mayor of Dacorum, Cllr. Roger Taylor, the Mayor of Berkhamsted, Cllr. David Collins, and the Lady Mayoress, Elaine Collins (who is a trustee of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust), the President of the Old Berkhamstedians, Natasha Charlton.

He gave thanks to Mark Steed (Principal, Berkhamsted School) for his generous hospitality, to the members of the local council and other organisations for their help and cooperation, to the Festival secretary Colin Garrett for his immense organisation, to Peter Gieler (general secretary of the Anglo-Austrian Society) for his society's generous sponsorship of Cornelia Mayer's appearances, to the Trustees for their unswerving support, to the many guest speakers whose quality so enriched the four-day event and to the public who come from near and far to support the Festival and to make it such an exciting and thriving event.

Dr. Charles Drazin on "The Oklahoma Kid"

2010-04-27T02:02:00.011+01:00

After the Birthday Toast at the Graham Greene International Festival on the evening of Saturday 3rd October 2009 Dr. Charles Drazin spoke on "The Oklahoma Kid", or Holly Martins in the film of The Third Man (directed by Carol Reed, UK, 1949). He offered a sympathetic portrait of Holly Martins, the writer of "Westerns" and amateur investigator.

Harry Lime, Dr. Drazin argued, has stolen the show for sixty years. He enters the film two-thirds the way through and takes part in only one big dialogue, yet everyone talks about him. Like Harry, the city of Vienna is beautiful and seductive, and both take the audience’s attention away from Holly Martins. Holly is not the brightest pin in the box, and not a very efficient detective. He is painfully lacking in confidence, and anyone whose closest friend is Harry Lime is not well-off for friends. At the end of the film he is not lucky in love either. Sophisticated people do not recognise him. Some cannot remember his name, or call him by the wrong name. While Kurtz tries his hand at flattery, Sergeant Paine’s good opinion of Holly’s books is not enough to feed his low self-esteem. Holly says of himself: “I’m just a hack writer who drinks too much, and falls in love with girls.” He belongs to a gallery of losers, and does everything in the wrong way, yet he stands up for all of us in the best way. Vienna has an air of moral abdication, and the only people who take moral stands are those who are paid to do so. Others do not want to become involved. Anna Schmidt thinks that Harry is dead, and the question of whether he was murdered or not does not matter to her. However, Holly’s moral antenna is still intact, as his scenes with Crabbin (at the Hotel Sacher) and Lime (on the Great Wheel) show. So he is a very important character in the story. He thinks about right and wrong, and he makes moral choices. His faith in humanity is paradoxically justified by Anna’s rejection of him.

Dr. Drazin lectures in Film Studies at Queen Mary College in the University of London. His publications include In Search of the Third Man (1999), Korda: Britain's Only Movie Mogul (2002), The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s (1998) and The Man Who Outshone the Sun King: Ambition, Triumph and Treachery in the Reign of Louis XIV (2008).

Kate Adie praises the soldiers and remembers the foundlings

2010-01-16T19:59:00.019Z

In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), on the afternoon of Saturday 3rd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival, the writer and journalist Kate Adie gave a highly professional and witty talk titled “Into Danger”, in which she spoke about her life and work as a reporter who, like Greene, ventured into difficult places often during a time of war.

Kate informed her attentive audience that journalists were assigned to their work on the same principle as a taxi driver finds his next fare. An event happens, and the first journalist in the queue is assigned to cover the story, whether it is the outbreak of war or the beginning of Crufts’ dog show.

She explained that being a journalist in a conflict zone was less dangerous than one might suppose. A journalist’s responsibility was to stay clear of trouble, and to return with her story on behalf of the public. She emphasised the outstanding courage which is demonstrated, for example, by the soldier whose task is to approach a bomb or mine and to defuse it.

She recalled that, as a journalist, she had looked at the lives of the foundlings of The Coram Foundation based in Berkhamsted on the site now occupied by Ashlyns School. These children were kept separate from the town, and in line with eighteenth century thinking they were taught to do simple work which was likely to be useful in service. She offers a brief history of foundlings in her book Nobody’s Child (2006).

Kate Adie is a former Chief News Correspondent to the BBC, and the author of Into Danger: Risking Your Life for Work (2008), Corsets to Camouflage: Women and War (Imperial War Museum, 2004) and The Kindness of Strangers: The Autobiography (2003). She was awarded the OBE in 1993, and won BAFTA’s Richard Dimbleby Award in 1990. She has honorary degrees from ten universities, is an Honorary Professor of Journalism at the University of Sunderland, and has three Honorary Fellowships.

David Crystal goes 'careful' in "The Third Man"

2009-12-22T01:41:00.031Z

In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), on the afternoon of Saturday 3rd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival, Prof. David Crystal OBE (above) (University of Bangor) gave a lively and informative conference paper titled “Going Careful in The Third Man: a Linguistic Exploration”. His text was enriched by many dramatised readings and quotations delivered in lively and convincing style by his wife, Hilary (above left), and his son, Ben (above right).

David pointed out that, whenever Greene draws attention to a character’s language, we know that he will be a bad guy. If Greene points to a problem of communication, he is giving his characters a warning. Ambiguity is a linguistic clue. Telling lies about language is the ultimate sin in Greeneland. In all of Greene’s prose fiction there are very few language jokes, for language is no laughing matter.

In The Third Man there are over forty references to language, working like a leitmotif and stressing the theme of unintelligibility. Everywhere there are foreign accents, which work as ominous signs. Lack of understanding does not bode well, and Holly Martins’ lack of language is a problem for him --- and for others whom he meets. Style too leads to awkwardness. Names also provide a special sort of tension, and so too do mispronunciations, mis-namings and insults.

In the eighteen months or so since he had been engaged by the Festival director Dermot Gilvary to give this talk --- during which time David had been busy not only with writing but also with lectures and broadcasts all around the world, as we can see on his Blog --- he had read (or re-read) the complete novels and stories of Graham Greene. What a feat! And such dedication to research and scholarship was greatly appreciated by his large and enthusiastic audience.

At the Festival’s book stall the public was able to purchase copies of David’s latest book, other titles written by him. Not surprisingly, there was a cluster of devoted readers who queued to have their copies signed and to express their pleasure at hearing such a well researched and entertainingly delivered talk.

To open the batting on the Saturday afternoon at the Festival 2010 (i.e. 2nd October 2010), we will have Michael Brearley OBE, former England cricket captain, former President of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), and current President of the The British Psychoanalytical Society. His provisional title is “A (second) Psychoanalyst looks at Graham Greene”. More details will be published later.

"In Memoriam": Ken Sherwood (1935-2009)

2009-12-21T23:18:00.014Z

In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), on Saturday 3rd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival, the Trustee former Festival director David Pearce gave a Tribute to Ken Sherwood, who died on Monday 6th April last.

Along with David, Ken was a co-founder of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, and with much regret David noted that this Festival, the twelfth, was the first one without Ken. David recalled that the Trust was Ken’s brainchild, that Ken had demonstrated an intuitive understanding of what works, and that he had helped to create an organisation which binds together the town of Berkhamsted, the School, Graham Greene the man and his family.

He explained that Ken’s energy had provided the essential momentum to the project, for example in establishing the charitable status of the Trust, in becoming the archivist and in founding the Friends. In these and in many other respects Ken enjoyed the unstinting help and support of his wife, Jenny.

The Guardian's Michael Billington looks at Graham Greene's plays

2009-12-02T23:52:00.029Z

In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), on Saturday 3rd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival Michael Billington (The Guardian's theatre critic) gave a conference paper titled “The Plays of Graham Greene”, in which he placed Greene's plays in their theatrical context.

He established that Greene began writing in the heyday of the well-made, West End play, and argued that, although The Living Room and The Complaisant Lover certainly deserve revival, Greene's predicament was his adherence to formal conventions which were being questioned by the work of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht and the Royal Court school of playwrights. He suggested that Greene's plays are the work of a skilled craftsman, and he commented upon some of the differences in the ways that dramatists and novelists manage the problem of time.

Michael argued that in his fiction Greene also acknowledged the existence of rules, but in his novels he brilliantly extends the accepted conventions. Greene widened the map of modern British fiction and took it away from parochial concerns. He also raised questions about the novel’s inherent mendacity and the unreliability of the narrator.

Michael Billington is the author of State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 (2007), Harold Pinter (2007) and other texts on plays and playwrights.

At the Festival 2010 on the evening of Friday 1st October at the Civic Centre, Berkhamsted (UK), Dr. Joe Spence (historian and Master of Dulwich College) will introduce a series of dramatised readings from Greene’s plays. More details will be announced later.

Chris Hull's New Research on "Our Man in Havana"

2009-11-22T04:42:00.015Z

In an innovation at the Graham Greene International Festival the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust sponsored a conference paper on New Research on Graham Greene. In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK) on the morning of Saturday 3rd October 2009 Dr. Chris Hull (Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, Nottingham University) delivered the first talk in what the festival director Dermot Gilvary hopes will become a regular feature at the Festival.

In a paper titled “Prophecy and Comedy in Havana: Greene’s entertainment and the reality of British diplomacy in Cuba” Chris told a large and fascinated audience that Our Man in Havana, which was published just four years before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, contained a fine example of Greene's renowned prescience of real events with its comic portrayal of an invented missile site based on designs for an Atomic Pile vacuum cleaner.

The novelist's research and writing of his satirical spy-fiction was simultaneous with the guerrilla campaign led by Fidel Castro in Cuba from 1956. In fact, Greene involved himself directly in real events, when he indirectly pressured the British government in late 1958 to curtail its sales of arms to the rebels' nemesis, the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista. Following the triumph of the Cuban revolution on 1st January 1959, in the press Greene castigated the Foreign Office for its “extraordinary ignorance of Cuban affairs”. Later, after the island's absorption into the Soviet orbit, British intelligence reports from Cuba read remarkably like excerpts from Greene's novel. Chris suggested that any ordinary visitor to that place might have provided more reliable information than the British government possessed, that newspapers were more informative and that diplomats in Havana were ineffective. He wondered if Greene’s prescience was “a sheer fluke” --- as the writer later claimed --- or if he did indeed possess a talent for prophecy.

The next talk in the New Research series will be given at the Festival 2010 by the Daily Telegraph journalist, BBC broadcaster and best-selling author Tim Butcher, who will focus on Greene’s time as a traveller in Liberia and Sierra Leone in 1935 and as a spy in Sierra Leone in 1942-43. His provisional title is “Chasing the Devil: How Greene lost his heart to West Africa”. More details will be announced later.

Rebekah and Bill launch Creative Writing Awards at new workshops

2009-11-03T22:21:00.058Z

In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), on Saturday 3rd October 2009 a new and alternative event --- Creative Writing Workshops in prose and screenplay writing --- ran parallel with the main events of the Graham Greene International Festival. They were practical one-day courses for aspiring adult writers of all ages, and they appealed to those who had aspirations to write or to have some writing published or broadcast --- and also to those who were simply curious or who wanted a change from the mainstream of the Festival.

The leaders, Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone (above, left) and Bill Ivory (above, right), are experienced and successful writers who willingly shared their experiences and offered tips and guidance. They asked their participants to write to particular purposes, and they helped them to look positively and critically at what they had written on the day. They also gave them valuable insights into the lives of professional writers.

Rebekah, who was educated at Oakham School and Cambridge, was awarded a Graham Greene Birthplace Trust grant in 2004 and was the co-founder and joint editor of Tales of the Decongested. She is a partner of Apis Books, and the published author of short stories and a novel.

Bill Ivory, who was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Nottingham in 2009, writes drama for BBC television, film and stage. He won The Edgar Allan Poe Award in New York presented by The Crime Writers Association of America for Best Television Drama Series.

The Festival director, Dermot Gilvary, commented, “I hope that the creative event has added a fresh, strong and permanent element to the Festival, and one would like to think that Greene himself would have approved of the enterprise.”

At the Workshops another exciting aspect was added to the work of the Trust and the Festival, when Rebekah and Bill launched the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust Creative Writing Awards 2010. Members of the public --- including equally those who attended the Festival and those who did not--- were invited to submit creative writing pieces under one or more of the following headings: fiction writer, thriller writer, travel writer, screenplay writer, writer under twenty-one years of age, Berkhamsted School writer and Old Berkhamstedian writer.

Each entry must be written mostly in the English language. The word limit for each prose piece is eight hundred words. The limit for screenplay writers is four pages of text in a normal font size on A4 paper. The deadline for submission of entries is 1st April 2010. Entries must be typed, and sent on pdf files to the Awards’ Secretary: RGuy@berkhamstedschool.org

Prose writers must begin with the following line, and continue from there:
“A whistle blew, and the train trembled into movement….”

Screenplay writers must embed this line somewhere in their texts:
“A whistle blew, and the train trembled into movement….”

Full details of the Awards are also available on the website. Click here for a pdf version of the rules and practices.

Good luck to all you writers!

Vincent D'Onofrio stars in "Five Minutes, Mr. Welles"

2009-11-02T00:47:00.008Z

At the Civic Centre, Berkhamsted (UK), on the evening of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival the audience saw a remarkable thirty-minute film titled Five Minutes, Mr. Welles (Brooklyn Hazelhurst, USA, 2005).

This short film was directed by Vincent D’Onofrio (above, top) who acts the part of Orson Welles for the second time in his career. The actor is imagined struggling to learn his lines during filming of The Third Man. The only other character in the piece is Welles’ female assistant (played by Janine Thériault). She tries to help the actor, but, though the two appear to have been intimate, he suspects her of spying upon him on behalf of David O. Selznick. He doubts the quality of the lines which have been written for him for the scene on the Great Wheel at the Prater, but she reminds him that he has accepted his fee, so that he can work on Othello. The action is given urgency, as an off-set voice is heard to call “Five Minutes, Mr. Welles”, summoning him to his day’s work on the set.

The piece is filmed in black and white and located entirely within one claustrophobic room. With back lighting, silhouettes and tilted camera angles, the style of filming pays tribute to Robert Krasker’s Oscar-winning cinematography for The Third Man and also to the techniques of Citizen Kane.

In addition to offering an interesting, if fictional, interpretation of Welles’ character, the film (which has only been screened previously at the Venice Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival) also speaks to us about artistic inspiration and creativity. Vincent D’Onofrio may be seen every week on television on Channel Five’s “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”.

The film was introduced by Dr. Brigitte Timmermann (above) who wrote insightfully about Orson Welles in her splendidly illustrated book The Third Man's Vienna (Shippen Rock, 2005).

The Festival director Dermot Gilvary acknowledged the great help which he received from Philip Farah (General Entertainment Company Inc., New York and Hollywood) in the arrangements for the screening of Five Minutes, Mr. Welles.

Cornelia Mayer plays Karas

2009-11-01T17:48:00.008Z

At the Civic Centre, Berkhamsted (UK), on the evening of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival, the celebrated Viennese zither teacher and player Cornelia Mayer entertained a large and appreciative audience, as she played a selection of compositions and arrangements by Anton Karas and other famous composers of zither music.

In the Hemel Hempstead Gazette the journalist Rita Knowles reviewed Cornelia’s performance with these words: “Throw away the impression that the zither is the instrument of choice for wine bars and parties. Cornelia showed us undreamed of nuances of sound, as she gave her recital of classical pieces, proving the zither truly an instrument of the salon or soirée.”

Peter Gieler, general secretary of the Anglo-Austrian Society, introduced the classical section of Cornelia’s concert. When the virtuoso musician progressed to the score of The Third Man, the historian and author, Dr. Brigitte Timmermann, (Vienna Walks and Talks) explained the development and variations of leitmotifs such as "The Harry Lime Theme" and "Anna Schmidt’s Music".

Though Anton Karas composed his film score without the aid of written music, playing as he watched the rushes of film, Cornelia has meticulously transcribed the notes to paper, and she hopes at some stage to record and to publish a complete musical score.

The Festival director Dermot Gilvary thanked the Anglo-Austrian Society for its generous sponsorship of Cornelia’s appearances.

Prof. François Gallix examines "The Empty Chair"

2009-11-01T16:17:00.011Z

In a late addition to the programme on the afternoon of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival in Berkhamsted (UK), Professor François Gallix (left) (University of the Sorbonne, Paris) gave a short talk on his fascinating discovery of Greene’s previously unknown, unfinished and unpublished manuscript, “The Empty Chair”.

Prof. Gallix informed the Festival that he had found fifty-six hand-written pages in Box 12, Folder 2 at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Austin, Texas (USA). After he had transcribed the 22,000 words to computer (creating seventy pages of typescript), he approached the author’s children, Francis Greene (who looks after his father’s literary estate) and Caroline Bourget for permission to publish.

In a literary game the first chapter was published anonymously on 12th December 2008, as readers of The Times (London, UK) were given the full chapter and this invitation: “An undisputed great of British literature wrote this newly discovered gem. Can you play literary detective, and work out who the author is?”

The game proved to be difficult, even for the experts, as “The Empty Chair” was written in the style of --- and as a tribute to --- Agatha Christie. There were only three readers who gave correct answers, and each was rewarded with a bottle of champagne!

Prof. Gallix revealed that the final sentence is unfinished, and that there are various possibilities about how the story might end. He also considered that readers can see how Greene’s writing strategy might develop with respect to his sense of dialogue, the gestures of his characters, the audacity of his comparisons, the many allusions to theatre and the references to the actor who played Macbeth. He noted that “The Empty Chair” was the title of the first chapter, that the novella itself has no title of its own, that there were some inconsistencies in the names or spellings of names of characters, and that Greene himself was only twenty-two when he wrote this story.

In mid-July 2009 the first chapter of “The Empty Chair” was published by Strand magazine, which will publish the other four chapters in successive quarterly editions.

The local journalist Louisa Felton (above, right) of the Hemel Hempstead Gazette, who contacted Prof. Gallix for some advance news in August, also recorded an interview with the French scholar, while he was in town during the Festival, and her text was published with photographs in her newspaper.

Fr. Mark Bosco SJ on "The End of the Affair" and Catholic Literary Modernism

2009-10-26T23:57:00.018Z

On the afternoon of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival Fr. Mark Bosco, S.J., gave a most thoughtful conference paper on “Greene: Catholic Literary Modernist”, and drew stimulating questions from his attentive audience.

He argued that Catholicism had been a minority tradition in England until Cardinal John Newman and the re-establishment, which provided opportunities --- though they had enemies to the left and right --- for English intellectuals and converts, such as Chesterton, Knox and Sitwell, and such as Greene and Waugh, for Catholicism offered a way to be Modern. In The End of the Affair Greene offered a vision of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God in his most persistently theological novel.

Fr. Bosco teaches in the Departments of English and Theology and is Director of Catholic Studies at Loyola University, Chicago. He is reputed to be the most eminent scholar of Greene in the USA, and he is the author of Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (2005).

Much has been written about Graham Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts. Greene's early books are usually described as "Catholic Novels", for he not only uses Catholic belief to frame the issues of modernity, but he also offers Catholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. In his book Mark Bosco argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptive understanding of the Catholic genre and obscures the impact of Greene's developing religious imagination on his literary art. In his review of Mark's text Albert Gelpi, Emeritus Professor of English, Stanford University (California), commented that his argument became "utterly convincing" because of "his richly nuanced reading of the novels".

Mark Bosco also wrote the introduction to the edition of The Honorary Consul for the Penguin Classics series in 2008.

Tom Aitken on Greene and Rolfe, Two Spoiled Priests

2009-10-26T22:05:00.014Z

On the afternoon of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Town Hall (Berkhamsted, UK) Tom Aitken gave a fascinating talk to the Graham Greene International Festival on the title “Eccentric Catholics; Graham Greene and Frederick Rolfe as Spoiled Priests”.

Beginning with definitions of "Spoiled Priests", Tom enlightened and entertaining in a witty and erudite paper, in which he mingled analysis and narration, argument and quotation, fact and anecdote concerning sin, guilt, faith, doubt, depair and hope.

Tom’s research led him to the mid-1930s, when Greene reviewed a biography of a man who styled himself, according to circumstances as either Frederick, Baron Corvo or Fr. Rolfe. In 1904, the year of Greene’s birth. Corvo/Rolfe had published his best-known novel, Hadrian the Seventh. This text took the outline of his own life, and turned it into possibly the most outrageous, but possibly the best, egocentric paranoid fantasy ever written. In it, a twice-rejected candidate for the priesthood is plucked from a life of embittered, anonymous poverty and becomes, in rapid succession, a priest, then Pope. In Rolfe Greene had found a man whose Catholicism was even more eccentric than his own. His faith lay in liturgy rather than doctrine. Given the smallest excuse, he would explain at length the significance of a button on a priest’s cassock, the shape of the traditional mitre, the use of a certain dye for the cardinal’s red robe and other details of which most Catholics are ignorant. He was also capable of borrowing and never repaying large sums of money and of abusing in vile terms anyone foolish enough to help him. During the final period of his life he became virtually a squatter in Venice, conducting graphically described homosexual affairs with young "gondolieri".

Greene was transfixed: “These were the astonishing bounds of Corvo: the starving pander on the Lido and a man born for the church”. Between these bounds, between Paradise and the Inferno, he turned back and forth, victim of his own “devilish pride which would not accept even Heaven, except on his own terms”. Greene’s fascination with Rolfe’s mixture of piety and sheer nastiness is thought by some to have given Greene the germ of Pinkie in Brighton Rock --- along with other echoes and resonances throughout the fiction.

Tom, who is a favourite speaker at the Festival, became a freelance writer in the early Eighties, and has published articles, reviews and obituaries for various newspapers and magazines, including The Times Literary Supplement and The Charleston Magazine.

Rod Mengham reads Five Short Stories by Graham Greene

2009-10-18T19:16:00.018+01:00

Dr. Rod Mengham (Fellow and Director of Studies in English, Jesus College, Cambridge), who specialises in the study of nineteenth and twentieth century English Literature, has published on Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry Green and others. He has a particular affinity for the literature of the 1930s and '40s, and in the Town Hall, Berkhamsted (UK), on Friday 2nd October 2009 he delivered a conference paper to the Graham Greene International Festival on five short stories by Greene. Four were written in the 30s, and one in 1940.

In “I Spy” Rod found an abiding interest in espionage --- surveillance and observation --- as a child’s mind resolves questions of loyalty and betrayal. He saw emulation and mimicry in “A Day Saved”, which combines the mundane and the menacing, and he identified confused identity along with loyalty and betrayal in “Brother” and “The Basement Room”. He found that at the beginning of the war Greene returned to these preoccupations in “The Lieutenant Died Last”, as he imagined Nazi uniforms in an English pub and a battle in an English country house.

Rod’s talk was distinguished by the closeness of his reading of the chosen texts, the meticulous quality of his argument, and the mellifluousness of his delivery.

Jeremy Lewis on "The Other Greenes"

2009-10-18T10:29:00.008+01:00

On Friday 2nd October 2009 in the Town Hall (top right) Berkhamsted (UK), Jeremy Lewis (right) opened the first day of informal talks and conference papers at the twelfth annual Graham Greene International Festival. A writer, editor and historian, Jeremy is currently writing a book (to be published by Jonathan Cape in 2010) on the Greene family. He revealed some of his fascinating research in a highly informative talk, as he declaimed urbanely without notes, demonstrating encyclopaedic knowledge of his field coupled with wise and sympathetic understanding of his characters on both sides of the family tree --- “The Intellectual Greenes” and “The Hall Greenes”.

Before he introduced Jeremy Lewis to his avid listeners, the audience cheered, as festival director, Dermot Gilvary, reminisced that in Berkhamsted School on the morning of this same date in October Graham Greene was born --- one hundred and five years earlier --- in the year 1904.

Greene Festival celebrates The Third Man's Sixtieth Anniversary at The Rex

2009-10-18T00:21:00.015+01:00

On Thursday 1st October 2009 in front of a full house in the beautiful art deco environment of The Rex Cinema, Berkhamsted (UK), the twelfth annual Graham Greene International Festival began its celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the release of The Third Man in the UK by screening the classic thriller, which was written by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed. The film was introduced by Peter Mikl (above), the director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, and preceded by the gorgeous harmonies of Cornelia Mayer (above centre), the celebrated Viennese zither player, as she gave a short selection of popular film scores composed by Austrians.

Creative Writing Award for Berkhamstedians

2009-10-18T00:05:00.005+01:00

At the opening event of the Graham Greene International Festival 2009 Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone (top right) launched the competition for the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust's Creative Writing Award 2010 for any writer from Berkhamsted School. In a dynamic and interactive workshop organised by Rachael Guy, the School Librarian, and supported by the School's English Department, Rebekah was assisted by Creina Mansfield (University of Manchester) and David Strickland (University of East Anglia), as each gave advice on creative writing and tips on how to prepare entries for the competition. Writers may offer a prose text or a screenplay. For prose writers the prescribed first words of the story must be: “A whistle blew, and the train trembled into movement….” For screenwriters the same words must be embedded somewhere in the text. The closing date for receipt of entries is 1st April 2010. The complete rules of the competition are posted on the Trust's website, and writers may discuss their work on the Facebook page named Creative Writers and Graham Greene.

Festival 2009: Amendments to the Programme

2009-10-01T00:15:00.006+01:00

On Thursday 1st October at The Rex Cinema Peter Mikl (Austrian Cultural Forum) will introduce the screening of The Third Man, in place of the Austrian Ambassador.

On Friday 2nd October at 4.50pm at the Town Hall Prof. François Gallix will talk about his recent discovery of Greene's unfinished, unpublished manuscript "The Empty Chair".

On Friday 2nd October at the Civic Centre at 9.00pm Dr. Brigitte Timmermann will introduce the screening of Five Minutes, Mr. Welles with some thoughts on the actor Orson Welles, who played Harry Lime so memorably.

"The Empty Chair" at Graham Greene International Festival 2009

2009-09-02T10:31:00.012+01:00

At the 2009 Festival, Prof. François Gallix (Sorbonne, Paris) will give a twenty-minute introduction to his discovery of Graham Greene’s unfinished and unpublished manuscript “The Empty Chair” at 4.50pm on Friday 2nd October in the Town Hall, Berkhamsted (UK).

Prof. Gallix’s words will follow the published afternoon programme, which includes talks by Tom Aitken (St. Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden, UK) and Fr. Mark Bosco, S.J. (Loyola University, Chicago, USA).

Following last month's publication of the first chapter of five in the monthly serialization of "The Empty Chair" in Strand magazine, Prof. Gallix was recently interviewed by Marijke Peters on Radio Netherlands Worldwide. Click here to read Miss Peters’ article and to listen to her interview.

Click here to listen again to the interview on BBC Radio 4's "Today" programme (broadcast on 27th July 2009), when Andrew Gulli (managing editor, Strand) and Prof. Cedric Watts (Sussex Univerity) were interviewed.

Prof. Gallix will speak at greater length upon Greene's unpublished work in a full talk at the Festival in 2010, by which time each of the five chapters of "The Empty Chair" will have been published.

Click here to read Alison Flood's article on "The Empty Chair" in "The Guardian" newspaper.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide investigates "The Empty Chair"

2009-08-23T13:58:00.008+01:00

Greene’s avid readers will be well aware that Prof. François Gallix’s discovery of Graham Greene’s unfinished and unpublished manuscript "The Empty Chair" (1926) is being issued in five monthly episodes by Strand magazine.

Recently Prof. Gallix was interviewed by Marijke Peters on Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW), and subsequently she wrote about Greene and Gallix for RNW's website.

Click here to read Miss Peters’ article and to listen to her interview, which lasts for 3 minutes and 7 seconds.

BBC's Humphrey Hawksley's Journey Without Maps

2009-08-23T12:24:00.013+01:00

Graham Greene has been much in the news recently, and, if you have missed anything by Humphrey Hawksley (BBC World Affairs Correspondent) about West Africa, here is your chance to catch up.

Greene's Journey without Maps (1935) follows the writer’s journey through Sierra Leone and Liberia. He ran into drunken politicians, war lords, Christian missionaries, secret societies and chiefs with total power over their villages. The book questions the intentions of the West in Africa, and asks overarching questions. What were the whites --- as Greene then called the West --- actually doing there? Were they destined to failure? And would Africa always have the last “say”? In the last ten years --- with Britain taking the lead --- the West has intervened in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Humphrey Hawksley has retraced Greene's journey and reported on whether eighty years later the West's presence in Africa has changed, and to see what has changed and what has not.

Click here to listen again to Humphrey Hawksley’s report which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday 30th July 2009. The recording is timed at 8.45am, and lasts for 3 minutes 46 seconds.

Click here to watch Humphrey Hawksley’s film “Dancing with the Devil” in the series “Our World”. The film has been televised at various times this weekend on BBC News 24 and previously on BBC America.

Click here to read the report on the BBC news website.

Click here to view the website of Humphrey Hawksley, who may be able to visit the Graham Greene International Festival in October 2010, if his schedule permits.

"Empty Chair": Greene's incomplete "whodunit"

2009-07-27T18:56:00.016+01:00

The first chapter of an unfinished Graham Greene novel Empty Chair has been published by Strand magazine. Andrew Gulli (Managing Editor of Strand) and Professor Cedric Watts (Sussex University) discussed the recently discovered novella this morning on BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme.

The manuscript, which was written in 1926 when the writer was aged 22, was recently found in the vaults of a university in Texas, and the 22,000 words of its five chapters have been transcribed by Prof. François Gallix (University of the Sorbonne, Paris).

To hear the broadcast again, just click the link here.

Cedric Watts adds that "Empty Chair is remarkably interesting with all sorts of anticipations of later Greene, including not only a theologically-sophisticated Roman Catholic priest but also a fishy and chubby character called Chub". Readers will remember that 1926 was the year in which Greene was converted to Catholicism after a period of instruction from a priest.

Humphrey Hawksley's Journey Without Maps

2009-07-26T20:41:00.006+01:00

On Thursday 30th July 2009 from 11.00am to 11.30am BBC Radio 4 will broadcast “A Journey Without Maps” the third of nine programmes in its series “Crossing Continents”, as Humphrey Hawksley retraces the extraordinary journey undertaken on foot by Graham Greene from Sierra Leone across Liberia in 1935. He feasts on sardines and luncheon meat, meets the lightning makers and devil dancers and is involved in a near-fatal car crash. The reporter asks, “How has West Africa changed? Is it better or worse than it was seventy years ago?”

Humphrey Hawksley is a leading BBC foreign correspondent, author and commentator on world affairs. For more than twenty years he has reported on key trends, events and conflicts from all over the world, including Kosovo, Iraq, and Sri Lanka, from where he was expelled while covering the civil war. From 1990 he was based in Hong Kong, and in 1994 moved to Beijing to open the BBC's first television bureau in China.

He has written various novels, including Red Spirit (2001), The Third World War (2003) and Security Breach (which was first published as The History Book, and reprinted in 2008).

The photograph shows Humphrey at Pendembu Station in Sierra Leone with his copy of Greene’s novel Journey without Maps (1936), and you can learn more about his work and travels on his Blog:
http://www.humphreyhawksley.com/blog/

Dr. Chris Hull: Our Man in Havana

2009-07-20T18:53:00.007+01:00

Dr. Chris Hull will speak to the Festival at 9.30am on Saturday 3rd October 2009 on the topic of "Prophecy and Comedy in Havana: Greene’s ‘entertainment’ and the Reality of British Diplomacy in Cuba". He is based at the University of Nottingham (UK), and his research, which focuses on the history of Anglo-Cuban relations from 1898 to 1964, offers an alternative to the plethora of historical studies undertaken along the Washington-Havana axis. Chris studied in Cuba for five months in 1997-98, where he witnessed both Che Guevara’s funeral (after the revolutionary’s remains were discovered and repatriated from Bolivia) and the visit of Pope John Paul II. His academic research has taken him to Cuba and the United States, but predominantly to the National Archives at Kew Gardens.

Chris’ talk marks the launch of what we hope will become an annual event, namely a talk on New Research on Graham Greene sponsored by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust.

"Five Minutes, Mr. Welles"

2009-07-20T18:31:00.012+01:00

At the Graham Greene International Festival on Friday 2nd October 2009 in the Civic Centre (Berkhamsted, UK), you can see a remarkable thirty-minute film titled Five Minutes, Mr. Welles (Brooklyn Hazelhurst, USA, 2005), starring Vincent D'Onofrio (above, seated on set) (who also directed the piece) and Janine Thériault (below).

Brigitte Timmermann on BBC Radio 4

2009-06-02T14:24:00.017+01:00

This morning on BBC Radio 4 in a thirty-minute programme titled "Vienna and the Shadow of The Third Man" Dr. Brigitte Timmermann uncovered Graham Greene's Vienna, and took us in the footsteps of the classic thriller sixty years on from its release.

Walking through the city, she tells stories which have fascinated generations of film buffs, from the role of Soviet master spy Kim Philby to tales of Sir Carol Reed's and Graham Greene's late night visits to Vienna's seediest bars.

With the help of the directors of The Third Man Museum in Vienna (seen on the left in the photograph), Brigitte explores Vienna's hidden history and examines why The Third Man was initially unpopular in the city which inspired it.

Brigitte (seen in the centre of the photograph above) is well known in Berkhamsted as a Friend of the Festival and also as a historian and tour guide in Vienna.

The programme is available to listen to again on BBC iPlayer until 12:02pm Tuesday 9th June 2009. You may see and read more about The Third Man Museum at its website.

Kate Adie, OBE

2009-05-27T08:53:00.004+01:00

Kate Adie, OBE, former Chief News Correspondent to the BBC, will speak to the Festival at 3.30pm on Saturday 3rd October 2009. Like Graham Greene who began his working life as a journalist and who visited war zones as a reporter, Kate is famous for her willingness to take personal risks in the interests of telling the truth about a story. The title of her talk will be Into Danger, which picks up the first two words of the title of her autobiographical book Into Danger: Risking Your Life for Work which was published last year. Kate's talk may allude to the similarities between her own life and the situations in which Greene found himself, but it will focus upon her own work.

Comments

2009-05-27T08:44:00.003+01:00

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Prof. David Crystal, OBE

2009-05-24T14:21:00.010+01:00

The renowned linguist and author of more than a hundred published books including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (second edition, 2003), Prof. David Crystal, OBE, will talk to the Graham Greene International Festival at 2.00pm on Saturday 3rd October 2009. David is a very witty and entertaining speaker, and in addition to lecturing all over the world he has made many radio and television appearances. As a great fan of The Third Man, he has chosen to speak on the title "Going Careful in The Third Man: a linguistic exploration".

Festival 2009

2009-04-14T02:21:00.014+01:00

At the twelfth annual Graham Greene International Festival in Berkhamsted (England, UK) from 1st to 4th October 2009 we shall celebrate once again the life and work of the writer during a four-day festival of talks, lectures, films, exhibitions and social events.

In particular, we will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the UK release of the classic "film noir" The Third Man (starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard and Alida Valli, photography by Robert Krasker, screenplay by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed). The film won the "Palme d'Or" at the Cannes Film Festival, and Robert Krasker received an Academy Award for Best Cinematographer. Many people consider it to be the best British film ever made.

The film will be screened at 7.30pm on Thursday 1st October 2009 at The Rex, which is an extremely popular and very beautiful art deco cinema in the centre of Berkhamsted.

Full details of the Festival 2009 are now available on our website:

http://www.grahamgreenefestival.org/

Ken Sherwood

2009-04-10T17:39:00.003+01:00

Ken Sherwood, who was a co-founder of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust and the annual Graham Greene International Festival in Berkhamsted (England, UK), died in the early hours of Monday 6th April 2009.

His Funeral Service will be held at 1.30pm on Friday 17th April 2009 at Sunnyside Church, Ivy House Lane, Berkhamsted, HP4 2PP.

Ken Sherwood

2009-04-06T16:39:00.003+01:00

Friends of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust will be saddened to hear that Ken Sherwood, a co-founder of the Trust and the International Festival, died this morning. He had been ill for some time. R.I.P.

Festival, Website, Facebook & Blog

2009-03-30T15:41:00.008+01:00

The Graham Greene International Festival takes place at the author's home town, Berkhamsted (England, UK). The dates usually include the 2nd October which was the date of the writer's birth. Many of the events take place in Berkhamsted School, where his father was the Headmaster, and where he studied as a schoolboy.

The Festival is an ideal opportunity to meet other enthusiastic readers of Greene, and to speak to distinguished writers and academics in the field of Greene scholarship.

The 2009 programme may be seen online at: http://www.grahamgreenefestival.org/

The printed Handbook will soon be available.

You are welcome to contact other friends of the Festival through our Facebook page, and to speak to other Greene fans by posting a message on this Blog.