Graham Greene and Achill – the original ‘love island’?
The current director of the Graham Greene International Festival, Kevin Ruane, and his immediate predecessor, Richard Greene, will travel to Achill Island, County Mayo, at the end of July for an event (‘Between the Lines’) celebrating Greene’s connection with the island.
Kevin is working on a major study of Greene and Catherine Walston, his lover from the late-1940s until the end of the 1950s. Catherine had a cottage on the island, and Greene, as a result of several visits early-on in the affair, formed a close attachment to the area. Later, he often yearned to return not just to a beautiful geographical location but to a moment in time when he felt that he and Catherine had been at their happiest, their love as unspoilt as the Atlantic coastline that could be seen from Catherine’s cottage. As is well known, out of this relationship sprang Greene’s 1951 novel The End of the Affair.
Richard, meanwhile, is not only Greene’s finest biographer – his Russian Roulette: the Life and Times of Graham Greene was published to great acclaim in 2020 – but also a brilliant poet and he will be reading from his latest collection of verse, Cannibal Rats (Véhicule Press, 2026), at the event on Achill on 28 July.
The organiser of ‘Between the Lines’ is Angela Maye-Banbury, the resident oral historian of Achill and a Greene expert in her own right who spoke passionately and movingly about the island’s literary heritage at last year’s Greene Festival (if you couldn’t make it to Berkhamsted, a recording of her talk can be listened to in our audio archive).
For those following us on our new Instagram account – grahamgreenebt – Kevin and Richard have promised plenty of photographs and maybe the odd video of what promises to be a wonderful event.