It's easy to assume that nothing beats reading alone. Easy but wrong, as Dublin Writers Festival proved to Eileen Battersby.

Sometimes things just work and work well. Literary festivals are odd events. They tend to be puffed up and self-congratulatory, always falling short of their musical equivalent. Given the choice, the prospect of a classical-music series, with gifted musicians performing the glorious music of the past, is far more attractive and satisfying than watching writers strut on a stage. Or so I thought, always preferring to read a book alone in the dead of night or high in a tree, well away from a gathering. How wrong I've been.

The fifth Dublin Writers Festival left the smugness and platitudes of such events behind, engaging with what it means to be writers and readers. Writers read and readers listened. No questions were asked, there was no post-reading chat. This formula works: let the work rise or fall on its own.

Language and story, the word as both image and weapon, enjoyed a field day. What were the highlights? Most of what I attended, in fact, from the opening reading by the stylish and urbane Australian poet Peter Porter to the contrasting intensity of two impressive US poets, the calmly questing and intellectually detached Ellen Hinsey and the edgier, intensely persuasive Carolyn Forché, whose reading had such urgency and truth. Experiencing it was to become a witness to a life's passage: "The room turns white again, and white. For years I have opened my eyes and not known where I was" (from Blue Hour). A session on contemporary Arab writing session was a revelation; it was also the only discussion forum - and a vital one.

Great things happened during four days in which literature emerged as international, important and real; as intellectual and instinctive. It was also funny and as offbeat as only daily experience can be. The Goethe Institut must be applauded for bringing Ingo Schulze, one of the best of contemporary German - and European - writers, to Dublin. Françoise Connolly of the French embassy approached the festival organisers with another brilliant idea, the participation of Marie Darrieussecq, who proved a superb reader of her work in English translation. She walked the tightrope between two languages with devastating passion and sensitivity.

Best of the Irish was Hugo Hamilton, reading from his memoir, The Speckled People, among the finest and most honest explorations of personal and cultural experience. Finally, finally, finally, indicating that Friday 13th need not be a bad experience, there was the chance to hear the words of one of the most original of contemporary scribes and storytellers, the Scot Alasdair Gray, author of Lanark (1981), who has been known to describe himself as "an elderly Glasgow pedestrian", brought to vivid life.

Political and astute, he is serious without taking himself seriously. He is a very good reader, wry and possessed of a perfect comic timing that suits his fluently cryptic, conversational style. "I don't think writers should write stories about writers, but as this is a literary festival . . ." - and so began a cautionary tale in which the narrator, a writer reduced to teaching writing, meets a bizarre young poet who has more than his share of beauty and self-belief.

Gray could well be seen as the high king of contemporary Scots writing, or even "the Godfather of Scotland's literary mafia", for many reasons, not least for the way he juxtaposes the surreal and the satirical. Great comic writing is an art that many have attempted, but few have mastered it quite as inventively as has this zanily eloquent original.

Gray's participation had looked like being a star turn - and so it was, as he cleverly evoked the bewilderment felt by an ageing writer who recalls a few meetings over many years with a young poet to whom he once says, "the theme of all your poems is the great poet you are going to be," and who never moves beyond that. Gray was paired with Dermot Healy, who reported exactly what can happen should a BBC documentary featuring tribal rituals be mistakenly screened in a small-town Irish cinema.

James Fenton, an interesting critic and commentator, was introduced as a literary man of many parts and voices. Yet unlike Gray, whose profundity is always brilliantly kept in check by subversive humour and an absolute grasp of society's insanity, Fenton appears weighed down by the role of literary great man. His sighs are simply deeper than everyone else's.

He approached the lectern with the weariness of a career prophet and seemed to brace himself for the riches he was about to deliver to a deserving audience. Exactly why he chose to read the libretto Love Bomb, a piece that has, unsurprisingly, left him "looking for a composer", is a question best answered by Fenton.

Having always been more interested in than engaged by Fenton, I found myself wondering if his high position in British poetry says more about current British literature than it does about his merits. There is a coldness and a self-conscious cleverness about his work that seldom achieve a felt emotion and explain why his essays are better than his poems, even though he considers himself primarily a poet.

It really didn't matter, however, such was the humanity, ease and urbanity of the wonderful Peter Porter. A writer in the style of Auden, whom he evokes and at times addresses throughout his work, nowhere more directly than in Max Is Missing (2002), a collection that includes The Philosopher's Garden and So Unimaginably Different And So Long Ago, he has evolved as a poet. The satire of his early work, with its outsider's look at London life, experienced a dramatic tonal shift during the 1970s, becoming more meditative and allusive and drawing on a range of literary, artistic and historical references without becoming oppressively cerebral.

Porter, who was born in 1929, is civilised and thoughtful; his anger has long since settled into a profound curiosity and wonder: "The stars are there as mathematics is, / The very there of nothing to be proved. Out of a corner of Philosophy's eye / A Mathematician's pinning on a post / Max is missing: ginger tabby cat / With white sabots - reward for his return." (From Max Is Missing.) Porter observes and thinks, all the while drawing on two experiences and two cultures, that of his native Australia and that of Britain, where he has lived for 50 years.

His delivery possessed wit and warmth, never becoming too comforting. As with the best writing in any genre, Porter's poetry balances the personal and the ordinary against the backdrop of wider human history. His genius may well lie in his sanity and clear-minded reading of life as lived about him.

The Irish poet Vona Groarke brought a down-to-earth directness to her reading of poems from Flight. Locality and a sense of place are central to her word pictures, which bring variation to familiar themes. Prefacing each poem with a relaxed, conversational introduction, she had a confidence and assurance. She spoke of the process of "fiction dropping into poems", the way stories from life drip into pools that become poems. There is a freshness at work, particularly effective in a poem in which she recalls a role she once held on the family farm: chasing the cattle.

She was followed by another established younger Irish writer, Keith Ridgway. Here is a voice well worth celebrating: very funny, very daring, all-seeing and responsive.

Anyone who had read Horses (1997), The Long Falling (1998) and Standard Time (2001) will not have been too surprised by The Parts, his anarchic extravaganza in which characters battle to make sense of their lives in a surreally modern Dublin. The first great Irish novel since Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, The Parts is both raucous and elegant. Ridgway is an unassuming, low-key reader; although his first extract, a satiric kaleidoscope of the many sides of modern Dublin, worked well off the page, this is a subtle, fast-moving burlesque that triumphs through its characterisation and narrative layers.

Much has already been written of The Speckled People, Hugo Hamilton's childhood memoir. Its appeal certainly helped fill the room at Project arts centre, where he read with Schulze and the Irish poet Peter Sirr. Never having heard Hamilton read, I was impressed with the power of his delivery, which conveyed the bewilderment and anger of the small boy in the book. He expresses the essential injustices children experience, particularly those endured by he and his siblings in a bilingual household in which Irish culture became equated with domestic tyranny.

Reading the sequences in which the boy and his brother and sister become "the children in the wardrobe", having become trapped when the closet in which they are playing tumbled over, Hamilton, the least likely of performers, demonstrated the magic of story and the enduring dictates of memory.

Very different but also wonderful was the voice of Schulze, author of 33 Moments of Happiness (1995, translated 1998) and Simple Stories (1998, translated 1999). Schulze read in German and, briefly, in English before handing over to Sirr, who read the fourth story in 33 Moments.

Whereas this first book takes an almost Chekhovian look at modern Russia through the eyes of an East German who, in coming to Russia, becomes, as Schulze says, "the man from the West", Simple Stories is about Germans trying to settle in what has become a new country. Schulze is an observer, kindly and human; he is also one of Europe's most exciting new voices.

Another of these voices belongs to Darrieussecq, the author of three outstanding novels and a writer whose language is exact to the point of being stripped bare of essence. Although her new novel, A Brief Stay With The Living, is disappointing, she is exciting and provocative. Her reading was remarkable in that she made her audience feel it was privy to a private encounter with language.

For his reading Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish winner of this year's International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, approached the podium with all the glee of a prize-winner. His reading from My Name Is Red was from the chapter narrated by a gold coin. It was very funny as well as telling. Pamuk has few illusions about man and money.

Sargon Boulus and Samuel Shimon from Iraq, Maram al-Massri from Syria andHassouna Mosbahi from Tunisia share a language, Arabic, and a culture that is diverse, exciting and consistently misunderstood and misrepresented in the West. Boulus held centre stage. Based in San Francisco, he has been able to inhabit a parallel culture universe and is certainly seen as guru. An attractive character with humour and style, he is an effective spokesman and important ambassador for his culture and his fellow Arabic writers. This session offered an amazing political and cultural peep through the door. Readers interested in finding out more should acquire copies of Banipal, a magazine published in London. Israeli writers such as Amos Oz and David Grossman now have international reputations. It is time we knew about a literature embracing a vast geographical and cultural area.

Neil Astley, editor of Bloodaxe Books, is not boasting when he says he tries to publish the best and most exciting voices in world poetry. Two of them performed in Dublin on Sunday. Ellen Hinsey, whose work I know only through The White Fire Of Time collection, has set out to express the known in new language. Detached, remote and subtle, she speaks as if coming from a world where words are weighted. It takes a while to absorb the energy behind the grace. As if she had not challenged us enough, she unexpectedly sang in a soft, beautiful voice. The sense of distance she creates is fascinating. She is an American honed by a European tradition rooted in philosophy.

Equally mesmeric yet far more immediate and urgent was Carolyn Forché, calling us as her collective witness. "I'm an American dissident" she said. Her career testifies to that, as does her art, particularly The Angel Of History, yet a personal depth and warmth are also at work.

Between them these US poets, open and allusive, direct and reflective, mythic and remembering, produced magic. They should be read and considered. The expression on the face of one of Ireland's finest poets, Dennis O'Driscoll, said it all: this is what poetry can do. What a reading, what a festival.