JO BAKER

Jo Baker is the best-selling British novelist of works such as Longbourn, in which she re-tells Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennett family’s servants, and most recently The Midnight News, set in London during the Blitz. That was a period of history that Graham Greene not only experienced personally and directly as a fire warden in Bloomsbury but later imported into his 1943 novel The Ministry of Fear, one of Jo’s favourites. ‘There’s something at once seedy and epic about this novel—as one might expect from Graham Greene,’ she explains. ‘Its protagonist is a damaged, morally compromised man, who stumbles into an intrigue…This is a cratered and carious London, where nothing is as it seems, and no-one can be trusted. The depiction of a bomb-blast—the impact, disorientation and devastation felt on a very immediate, physical level—is brilliant.’

PROFESSOR ANDREW BISWELL

DAVID BELBIN

David Belbin read most of Greene’s novels in the late-70s while at Nottingham University. In the 1990s he became a best-selling author of Young Adult novels (including Love Lessons and The Beat series). This century he has published more YA fiction, a memoir, short stories and several novels for adults (including The Pretender in which the protagonist forges a story by Greene). David lives in Nottingham where Greene spent four months in 1925-26 training as a journalist, wooing by letter his future wife Vivien, and preparing to become a Catholic. David’s new book Greeneland is a serial novel with chapters mapping to Greene’s Nottingham experience and appearing a century to the day after the actual events. Read for free at davidbelbin.substack.com

DR KEN FOX

Ken Fox has recently retired as Principal Lecturer in the School of Creative Arts and Industries, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, and now works as an independent researcher focusing on how cities and landscapes are represented in film and television. Ken is a native of Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, and he cites his visits to his hometown cinema in the 1960s and 1970s as a key source for his academic career as a film scholar. He also credits Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, which he read for the first time in 1976, for a reverse damascene moment, but more of that he promises at the festival where he will unpack and/or load up the “Gothic” in Neil Jordan’s 1999 film adaptation of The End of the Affair.

ROBIN INCE

Robin Ince is many things – a multi award-winning comedian, author, broadcaster, bibliomaniac, populariser of scientific ideas and all-round Professor of Curiosity. He is co-creator (and until recently co-host) of the Sony Gold Award-winning BBC Radio 4 series The Infinite Monkey Cage with Professor Brian Cox. As a stand-up comic Robin has toured the world and as an author he has written several acclaimed books, including Bibliomaniac (which earned him the prestigious Booksellers Association Author of the Year award) and I’m a Joke and So Are You: Reflections on Humour and Humanity. His most recent book, Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, was published in 2025. The Guardian has described Robin as a ‘becardiganed polymath’ and festival-goers will be delighted to learn that his polymathery, if not his cardigan, extends to Graham Greene of whom he is a big fan.

MELANIE McDONAGH

Melanie McDonagh is a distinguished journalist and author who writes for newspapers including The Evening Standard and The Daily Telegraph and commentates on culture, religion and public life in periodicals like The Spectator and The Tablet. In her latest book, Converts (2025), she explores why so many artists, writers and intellectuals converted to Roman Catholicism between the late-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. Among her case studies are Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Gwen John, G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. To this list can be added Graham Greene (who bridled at the label “Catholic novelist”, preferring to be known as a novelist who happened to be Catholic). This year marks the 100th anniversary of Greene’s conversion to Catholicism making Melanie’s visit to the Festival especially timely.

CADENCE RUSTUM

Cadence Rustum at just 23 years of age will be the youngest ever speaker at the Festival, now in its 27th year. Regular attendees will recognise Cadence who has been one of the team of helpers that help the event run so smoothly. But this year it’s her turn to take the spotlight. ‘Graham Greene came into my life a few years ago while I was studying at the University of Cambridge, finding The End of the Affair fortuitously in a second-hand bookshop off King’s Parade,’ she tells us. ‘I was taken in by the quarrelling lovers, Bendrix and Sarah, their love and hate intertwined, circling the possibility of forgiveness and quiet consolation. My dissertation discussed the human and divine love in The End of the Affair and The Heart of the Matter, exploring Greene’s Catholicism. Attending the Greene Festival, my understanding of the woman behind the mysterious “to C” epigraph has deepened, and with it my sense of Greene’s emotional world.’

ADAM SISMAN

Adam Sisman is an acclaimed biographer known for his penetrating archivally-driven investigations of the lives historians like A.J.P. Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and most recently Asa Briggs. However, probably Adam’s best-known work is John le Carré: The Biography from 2015, a writer with whom Graham Greene had a complex and sometimes strained relationship. In 1963, Greene’s dustjacket praise for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (‘The best spy story I have ever read’) helped make it Le Carré’s breakthrough novel, while for his part, Le Carré declared that Greene ‘carries the torch of English literature almost alone.’ Despite this apparent mutual public admiration, personal relations were sometimes less than harmonious. In 2023, Adam followed-up his Le Carré biography with The Secret Life of John Le Carré.

ROBERT VERKAIK

Award-winning journalist Robert Verkaik has been Home Affairs editor of the Independent and Security Editor of the Mail on Sunday, to name just two of his media roles. But he is also an author of many books including the Sunday Times bestseller The Traitor of Colditz. His latest book – published in April 2026 – focuses on the relationship between Graham Greene and Kim Philby, a source of endless interest and fascination for many decades now. At the heart of the book, which is entitled The Writer and the Traitor: Graham Greene, Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, is a question often asked but never satisfactorily answered: why did Graham Greene remain loyal to Britain’s most notorious traitor? In his festival talk, Robert will seek to resolve that mystery once and for all.