Every year, Galway's international festival of literature, Cuirt, gets more international. This year's programme brought together writers from Australia, Jamaica, Russia, Bosnia, America, Nigeria, and Mexico, as well as England, Scotland, Wales, Tuam, Clones, Lismore, Derry, and Dublin. Yet Cuirt still retains the intimate quality which makes it such a special festival, loved by writers and readers alike.
The inaugural event this year was an evening with travel writer Dervla Murphy, and short-story writer and Saoi, Ben Kiely. Lelia Doolan and Dervla Murphy sat in high-backed chairs on the stage of the Town Hall Theatre, folded their arms, and talked to each other about Murphy's travels. The theatre was packed, yet the two of them managed to create an atmosphere which felt as if the audience was listening in to a conversation in some rural kitchen.
Did Murphy have any plans to write a book about the west of Ireland, asked a member of the audience. "My publisher has wanted me to write that book for years. But I've gone off this part of Ireland. The Celtic Tiger has left too many pawmarks on it," was the laconic reply.
Ben Kiely, who will be 80 this year, came on afterwards to read his story, Home is on the Mountain. "I'm an auld fella now," he said, "an auld seanchaoi, and it's late, so I'll tell a story for this time of night." And he read with the mesmeric cadences of the superb seanchaoi that he indeed is.
From then on, there were six days of readings, debates, lectures, interviews, and music. This year's Cuirt lecture was "The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde", given by Professor Terry Eagleton. The Irish Times Cuirt debate saw editors of The Modern Library, Colm Toibin and Carmen Callil discussing their choices of the best 200 novels in English since 1950.
Nigerian performance poet, Patience Agbabi read with English singer, songwriter and poet, Labi Siffre, in one of the best-received events of the week. Poet and short story writer, Mary Dorcey, read with poet Vona Groarke. Groake, who has just won the £33,000 Strokestown Poetry Prize, was reading from her new book, Other People's Houses.
On Friday, American poet Chris Agee came on stage at the beginning of an event which was listed as a reading with three Bosnian poets, Vojka Djikic, Marko Vesovic, and Semezdin Mehmed-inovic. "There are things more important in life than poetry," he said. "And one of them is war. The war in the Balkans has meant that two of the poets, Marko Vesovic and Semezdin Mehmedinovic cannot be here today."
Absences can be as potent as presences: no one attending that reading is likely to forget the reasons why two of Bosnia's best-respected poets could not come to Galway. The subsequently amended programme turned out to be one to the most astonishing events of the week. Vojka Djikic read first, with translations read by Agee.
Then Vedra Smajlovic came on stage with his cello. Smajlovic, who now lives in Northern Ireland, became famous for attempting to keep people's spirits up by continuing to play his cello on the streets of Sarajevo during the siege. He had to leave his instrument behind. It was only this January that he was sent one as a gift from a friend in Brazil. "I open case and I cry," he said simply. "Since then, I have been composing." He played one of the new compositions; a haunting piece of music which troubled the air long after he had finished.
The young poet, Igor Klikovac, who now lives in London, came on last. He read several outstanding poems he had written some years ago while still living in Sarajevo. "The emotions which inspired these poems are long forgotten," he explained. "It is like the reversal of disappearance."
Attending Cuirt is a bit like backing a racehorse. You don't know by looking at the programme which event is going to end up the winner. This year, it was Pat McCabe's electrifying interview with Tom Murphy in the Druid Theatre, which was the highlight of the week for many people.
The smallness of the literary community in Ireland can sometimes seem incestuous, where everyone knows everyone else. But the McCabe-Murphy interview was an example of this knowledge working at its very best, just as Dervla Murphy and Lelia Doolan, who are friends, had conversed earlier in the week, McCabe and Murphy sat down and chain-smoked their way through a beautifully structured and wide-ranging discussion of the act of composition.
Murphy told of how, when asked to teach a series of classes for aspiring playwrights, he felt he didn't know how to write a play. He had written 20 of them at the time. "So I went out and bought a book. The dearest one I could find. I read it and I still didn't know." Both writers then discussed the place of emotions and technique in writing. "Emotions must come first," McCabe said. "Technique can come later." "Even when a writer isn't writing, things are happening in that period of incubation," Murphy said.
Events don't happen in isolation at Cuirt. Readings one day can evoke a response from another writer, who is reading the following day. Hugo Hamilton referred to John Cooper Clarke's controversial rock poetry performance at the beginning of his own reading with novelists Antonia Logue and Andrew Millar. "Well, it was great fun - if you weren't a woman, gay , or German," he said, echoing the disquiet which many had felt the previous night. Antonia Logue read a fight scene from her first novel, Shadow-Box, which will be published in May. This was the first time the public got to hear some of the book, which attracted headlines three years ago because of the size of Logue's advance - the publishing rights of which were auctioned on the strength of just six pages.
Seamus Deane, Andre Makine, and Amos Oz provided another undisputed highlight of the festival. Deane read an extract from his novel in progress, The Wizard. Makine read extracts in French from his hugely successful 1995 novel, Le Testament Francais, which were then read by his translator Jeffrey Strachan.
Amos Oz introduced himself by saying, "I come from Israel, which is neither a country nor a nation. It is a fiery collection of arguments." He read extracts in Hebrew and English from his novels, Fema and Panther in the Basement. An impassioned question and answer session followed. Asked what he thought the outlook for Israel was, he replied, "The clash between Palestine and Israel is a clash between right and right; one very powerful claim over another very powerful claim. We need to find a sensible compromise. The word `compromise' has a terrible reputation in European countries, but to me the word compromise is synonymous with the word life."
And as always, everyone got together in the evenings at the Brennan's Yard festival club and talked about what they had heard. On Friday, I overheard one man ask another if he had been reading at the festival. When told he was just a listener, the reply was: "You're not just a listener. Listening is an art that requires the surrender of the ego."
