Graham Greene International Festival 2024

Graham Greene is the best-known of all old Berkhamstedians. Britain’s outstanding author of the mid-twentieth-century, he was celebrated around the world and was repeatedly a candidate for the Nobel Prize. His works continue to be read by a vast audience.

An annual festival in his honour is now in its twenty-fifth year, and this year’s festival, 3-6 October, also celebrates the 120th anniversary of Graham Greene’s birth.

Graham Greene was the son of Charles Greene, who served for many years as headmaster of the school, and Graham later wrote in his autobiography of his complicated childhood there. It is fitting, then, that most of the events of the festival take place in the school.

This year’s program will offer a feast to those interested in espionage and the secret world. Nigel West, the leading expert on intelligence and security, will speak on Greene’s years with MI6, as will the novelist and biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, who has recently published his authorized life of the Bond-creator Ian Fleming, who was a good friend of Graham Greene.

A special guest this year is Lo Dagerman, the daughter of Anita Björk with whom Greene had a romantic relationship in the 1950s after the death of her husband the writer Stig Dagerman. Lo Dagerman will speak on her parents’ lives and artistic legacies.

Other speakers drawn from around the world will give accessible talks on Graham Greene’s affair with the set-designer and author Dorothy Glover, his travels in Mexico and in the Congo, and his influence on writers as far away as Japan.

For cinema enthusiasts, there will be screenings of two films, The Man Within (1947), based on Greene’s first published novel, and The Fallen Idol (1948), a suspenseful masterpiece for which Greene wrote the script.

Tickets and a full schedule are available online at www.grahamgreenebt.org