Cathy Hogan wins Award for best fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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.