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).