"The Empty Chair" at Graham Greene International Festival 2009

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Gallix (Sorbonne, Paris) will give a twenty-minute introduction to his discovery of Graham Greene’s unfinished and unpublished manuscript “The Empty Chair” at 4.50pm on Friday 2nd October in the Town Hall, Berkhamsted (UK).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 Gallix will speak at greater length upon Greene's unpublished work in a full talk at the Festival in 2010, by which time each of the five chapters of "The Empty Chair" will have been published.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"

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 François Gallix’s discovery of Graham Greene’s unfinished and unpublished manuscript "The Empty Chair" (1926) is being issued in five monthly episodes by Strand magazine.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

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"

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

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

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"

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).