The literary line-up at next week's Cúirt festival could hardly be more impressive, writes Eileen Battersby
Energy and diversity are sustaining forces of any annual event, and, as a glance at this year's Cúirt International Festival of Literature programme suggests, alive and well in Galway city. Now in its 17th year, the event has often achieved a fine balance of international and national and this time the organisers are in addition showcasing the Irish language in an exciting way by bringing poetry workshops and readings to Inis Mór, Árainn.
Literature - story and thought, debate and poetry - will become the stuff of everyday in Galway from Tuesday to Sunday, with writers and readers passing each other in the streets as they walk from event to event. One of the characteristics of Cúirt is that it has always emphasised that literature and culture are living, breathing, speaking and thinking realities.
Many of the participants are world-famous. The 1991 Nobel literature laureate, Nadine Gordimer, is an artist whose work has consistently merged the good with the important. She has challenged the political system that tore her society apart by writing stories about ordinary men and women struggling to live within it. Hers is a voice of protest. But she is also a storyteller fascinated by the personal, as in My Son's Story (1990) and one of her finest novels, None to Accompany Me (1994). The changes in South Africa have not blunted her voice, as she has continued to observe life in her country following political upheaval through novels such as The House Gun (1998), in which she examined how change merely meant new injustices, and The Pickup (2001), about one young woman's search for love.
Gordimer is a superb essayist and a formidable speaker. The clarity of her thought never ceases to impress. The Cúirt programme offers us the chance to see her as artist on Wednesday, when she reads from her fiction and later, on Friday, as thinker, when she contributes to another festival highlight, the Cúirt debate, "War of Words", on the responsibilities of war reporting. Also taking part in this is Misha Glenny, an authority on the Balkans, writer and activist Eamonn McCann and BBC Africa correspondent George Alagiah.
The long-awaited final volumes of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (volumes V and VI: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions) will be published in September by Cork University Press. Previewing the achievement - born in the debate, indeed outrage, that greeted the first three volumes,which were marked by their low representation of women - a seminar featuring the editorial board of these concluding volumes takes place on Wednesday at the Town Hall Theatre. Considering that some 900 writers are represented, it seems, some 11 years on, that the initial fury may have been well-justified.
With The South Bank Show, he became the public face of the arts in Britain, but novelist and Cumbrian Melvyn Bragg has often experienced the unfair drawbacks of being a populariser of the arts. There is no place for elitism in culture, however, and the fact remains that The South Bank Show has helped open up fiction, theatre, music and the visual arts to all-comers. On Thursday, Bragg the novelist takes over from the television presenter when he delivers the Anne Kennedy Memorial Lecture on the theme of the truth behind the fiction in his autobiographically-based novels.
An inspired pairing on Thursday brings together two of the most graceful writers currently at work, Rohinton Mistry and Anita Desai. It also celebrates one of international fiction's ever-evolving powers, the Indian novel in English, initiated by the great R. K. Narayan, which at its finest exudes humanity, humour, natural storytelling and the genius of the ordinary. Only US writers as a body offer a stronger presence.
Mistry is truly the heir of Tolstoy. His wonderful new novel, Family Matters, follows his two previous books, both Booker-shortlisted, Such A Long Journey (1991) and A Fine Balance (1995). Mistry shares the platform with three times Booker-shortlisted Anita Desai, whose work includes Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), Baumgartner's Bombay (1988) and Fasting, Feasting (1999). Desai's mixed Indian-German background has added subtle layers to her work. She is one of those brilliantly understated writers who makes the reader feel as if they have just discovered something very special - and Desai's novels are special. In common with fellow Indian writers such as Amit Chaudhuri and, of course, Mistry, Desai brings intelligence, humour and shrewd observation to her explorations of life. Expect standing-room only for this event - you have been warned.
So much has been written in praise of the US short story and much of it, all of it, happens to be true. The roll-call of honour, from Eudora Welty, to John Cheever, John Updike, William Maxwell, to Richard Ford, Russell Banks, Richard Bausch, Tobias Wolff and Annie Proulx, is long and rich.
Just when it seemed things could get no better, along comes David Means from Michigan. Over the last couple of years, news of his stories, such as the breathtaking 'Railroad Incident, August 1995', 'The Widow Predicament', 'The Gesture Hunter' and 'Tahorah' (a manic account of how not to die in hospital), have come through from the US to Europe. Assorted Fire Events was published earlier this year and on reviewing the 13 often violent, always powerful, at times funny stories in it, I realised that here was a writer with an exciting new voice, alert to tone, treating language as his own private territory.
Cúirt 2002 has done us all a favour by inviting David Means to Ireland for a reading on Friday - be there.
Galway Arts Centre presents the Cúirt International Festival of Literature 2002 from Tuesday to April 28th. To book, tel: 091-569777. For further details, tel: 091-565886 or visit www.galwayartscentre.ie