AWARD-WINNING novelist William Boyd is to adapt a Graham Greene novel for a feature film, two Oxford film producers have announced.

Father and son Victor Glynn and Phin Glynn have acquired an option to develop Mr Greene's last novel The Captain and The Enemy into a feature film.

Most of the writer's books have made it to the big screen, most famously Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair and The Third Man starring Orson Welles.

The Glynns will now work with Mr Boyd to produce the new movie.

He was last week awarded the Bodley Medal, the Bodleian Library's highest honour, at the Oxford Literary Festival.

The writer, who was in conversation with Bodley's Librarian Richard Ovenden at the Sheldonian Theatre, said: "I have always found The Captain and The Enemy a haunting read.

"It's a a book with a very strong, understated love story at its heart – I believe its strangeness and fractured nature make it ripe for a film adaptation."

Phin Glynn, brought up in Oxford and educated at the Dragon and St Edward's schools, recently produced Mad to be Normal, a biopic of Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing, starring David Tennant, Michael Gambon and Gabriel Byrne.

Phin Glynn's father Victor has been an Oxford resident for over 30 years and is an award-winning film producer.

Mr Boyd spent many years in Oxford as a doctoral student and then as a tutor at Oxford University's St Hilda’s College.

He has received worldwide acclaim for his many novels and screenplays, and his feature film credits include A Good Man in Africa starring Sean Connery, and Stars and Bars starring Daniel Day Lewis – both movies based on his own novels,

He also wrote and directed First World War movie The Trench, starring Daniel Craig and Cillian Murphy, and for TV he has adapted Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, and many of his own novels including Any Human Heart and Restless.

Victor Glynn said: "It's very difficult to get the rights to a Graham Greene novel – we are incredibly excited and plan to start shooting next summer."

Victor Glynn was one of the producers on Good and Bad at Games, a 1980s TV drama, thought to be based on Mr Boyd's school days.

Graham Greene lived for many years in Oxford and was an undergraduate at Balliol College.

He is recognised as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, and his best-known works include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair.

The novelist split from his wife Vivien Greene in the 1940s but they never divorced and for many years she lived at a house in Iffley Turn, until her death aged 99 in 2003.

Graham Greene died in 1991 at the age of 86.