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24 April 2011

Michael Brennan and Lee Langley will speak at Festival 2011





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.

18 December 2010

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.

16 December 2010

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.

02 October 2010

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.

21 September 2010

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.

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