The 27th Graham Greene International Festival, my first as director, draws ever nearer – Thursday 24th to Sunday 27th September – and I am delighted to be able to unveil an exciting line-up of guest speakers.
2026 is an important anniversary year for Greene: a century since his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Two of our speakers mark that moment. Last year, author and journalist Melanie McDonagh published Converts: from Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark – Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century (Yale UP, 2025) and she will be looking at Greene in the context of that wider conversion phenomenon. Approaching the matter from another angle will be writer David Belbin whose interest is Greene’s four-month sojourn living and working in Nottingham in 1925-1926; often neglected in studies of Greene’s life, this short period was important not only in terms of the development of his faith (he was baptised in the city’s Cathedral) but in shaping his subsequent career as a writer. Over the winter, some of you will have enjoyed David’s serialised novel Greeneland – his literary-fictional recreation of Greene’s time in Nottingham – which he published on Substack. You can still read Greeneland for free at https://davidbelbin.substack.com/
On the subject of anniversaries, The End of the Affair (considered by many to be Greene’s finest novel) is 75 years old this year and the Festival helps it celebrate with two contrasting talks. First, we have Dr Ken Fox, a cinema expert and film historian, who shows how director Neil Jordan’s 1999 film “Gothicised” the story. Then we have Cadence Rustum, who festival-goers over the last two years will recognise as one of our team of volunteer helpers. Cadence draws on her MA research in exploring afresh not just The End of the Affair but The Heart of the Matter (1948), the novels which catapulted Greene to worldwide fame (including a Time magazine cover portrait in 1951). At just 22, I believe that Cadence may be the youngest ever speaker in the Festival’s history.
Greene and espionage also features this year. Award-winning journalist and author Robert Verkaik will be talking about his new book, The Writer and the Traitor: Graham Greene, Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Headline, 2026). Along the way, he will doubtless address the regularly posed but never satisfactorily answered question: why did Greene remain a loyal friend of Britain’s most notorious traitor? Also joining us is Adam Sisman, the acclaimed biographer of historians A.J.P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper but best known for his brilliant books on John le Carré. 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. However, in the years that followed, the relationship between the two writers would develop along complicated and sometimes fractured lines.
We also have with us Jo Baker, the best-selling author of Longbourn (the retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennet family’s servants) and The Midnight News (Phoenix, 2023) which (like Greene’s Ministry of Fear, 1943) deploys the Blitz as its backdrop. Jo will offer a personal perspective on reading and re-reading Greene today: a contemporary writer of fiction passing judgement on a past master of fiction. Andrew Biswell,Professor of Modern Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, makes a welcome return to the Festival having spoken so engagingly on Brighton Rock two years ago. This time round his subject is the artist Paul Hogarth. We all know not to judge a book by its cover, but Hogarth’s illustrations for the Penguin paperbacks of Greene’s novels from the 1970s to 1990s are still much beloved by Greene readers.
The line-up of talks is completed by two fine public speakers. Robin Ince, who for many years co-hosted (with physicist Professor Brian Cox) the popular Radio 4 science programme The Infinite Monkey Cage, will share his thoughts on one of his favourite films, The Fallen Idol (1948). Greene wrote the screenplay, an adaptation of his own 1935 short story ‘The Basement Room’, and the film marked the first of his three wonderful cinematic collaborations with director Carol Reed – the others being The Third Man (1949) and Our Man in Havana (1959). Last but very far from least we have Ian Thomson, the award-winning biographer, travel writer, translator and literary critic who spoke so engagingly last year about Greene and Haiti’s Hotel Oloffson. This time round he takes us to Estonia in 1934 and Greene’s chance encounter with ‘Our Man in Tallinn’, the very model of a British spy.
As ever, the Festival will have two film nights. Kicking us off will be a filmed version of A Splinter of Ice, Ben Brown’s 2021 stage play which tries to recreate Graham Greene’s meeting with Kim Philby in Moscow in 1987. We are delighted that Ben will attend the screening and answer questions from the audience afterwards. Our other film is the 1973 version of England Made Me,directed by Peter Duffell and starring Peter Finch, Michael York and Hildegard Neil, in which intriguingly the action is transferred from Stockholm to Nazi Germany.
Completing the line-up will be Richard Shepherd’s excellent guided tour of Graham Greene’s Common on the Thursday afternoon and, on the Sunday morning, a tour of Greene’s school and its archive led by Lesley Koulouris. Add to that meals, a birthday toast and the meeting of friends old and new, and you have the ingredients for I hope will be a memorable festival. See you there.
KEVIN RUANE (kevin.ruane@canterbury.ac.uk)