When Helen Carey hosts tonight's opening of this year's Cuirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, she won't be able to stand back, relax and take a drink with the guests.
In theory, most of her work as director should be done. In practice, it is a bit like live television - or what live television used to be like, when there was almost every opportunity for the unexpected. "Take last year," she says. "Who would have predicted that Germaine Greer, one of the leading guests, would be taken hostage in her house just a few days before she was due here?"
Then last year's event was particularly challenging. Ms Carey had been appointed director of the Galway Arts Centre five months before, with just three months to prepare the festival's programme. Cuirt, which started in 1986, is a highlight in the art centre's calendar, and has built up a reputation for intimacy, informality and accessibility. Nobel award winning authors like Seamus Heaney and international names like Amos Oz can be found mingling in hostelries with local authors and poets, readers and critics.
Carey came to Galway fresh from a millennium arts project in Bristol, and had been away from Ireland for 12 years - working in the Tate Gallery in London, in Suffolk, in community arts projects with the homeless, in social housing, and with children. She had spent more time in "hard hats and wellingtons" than in formal gallery settings, she says, and yet her initial experience, after graduating from University College Dublin, had been with the National Gallery in Dublin, the Neptune Gallery, and as an arts critic with the Evening Herald.
Three months after the festival, a two-page interview in the Galway Advertiser introduced her as a controversial figure who had, among other things, failed to produce the annual Cuirt Journal.
"Never before has there been such a sustained attack on the Galway Arts Centre," it said, referring to recent correspondence in the publication before the interview.
"Never in the history of the arts in Galway city has there been such public criticism. Letters to this newspaper have sung stridently of the suspension of a literary magazine and, more, the disappointments felt by ordinary individuals at the apparent reluctance of Galway Arts Centre to work for them."
Ms Carey doesn't quite shrug it off - one can't afford to in Galway - but takes a philosophical attitude. "This sort of controversy, criticism, is not peculiar to Galway. "It happens everywhere. And the tensions between arts administrators and artists are often inevitable, due to the involvement of ego, and the mixture of lack of trust, a need to control, and fear - of change, usually."
Arts administration may be perceived to be a relatively new profession, but it isn't by any stretch of the imagination, she points out. "Lady Gregory was one. She was a writer herself, but was also a facilitator, giving Yeats and Synge their platform." Carey's attitude is that if she does her job well, she doesn't really need people to like her. "You don't take it personally," she says, while acknowledging that on this small island too much is personal.
This year's Cuirt programme reflects a lot of hard work, dating to last July, involving herself and co-ordinator Maura Kennedy for much of that time. Annie E. Proulx, author of The Shipping News and Dame Beryl Bainbridge are among the international names, along with Chris Abani from Nigeria, poets Frieda Hughes of Britain and Inger Christiansen of Denmark, Russian poet Elena Shvarts and Hungarian-born George Szirtes, Booker nominee John Banville, Jim Crace, Anne Michaels and US novelist Richard Powers.
Two of Ireland's highly acclaimed literary figures, poet Michael Longley and novelist and short-story writer John McGahern, have been booked for tonight, while Richard Murphy, author of The Cleggan Disaster, The Last Galway Hooker and other immortal verse, is joined later in the week by England's poet laureate, Andrew Motion.
Literature born out of prison is one of the themes, which is explored in seminar, video and readings. Lelia Doolan chairs a discussion on this next Saturday, with Danny Morrison, former inmate of Long Kesh and writer James Quinn, writer-in-residence at Strangeways Prison in Manchester, Dr Richard English, archivist of the IRA and prison libraries and Jane Meally of the Portlaoise Prison education unit.
There's much more: the annual Irish Times debate, on the politics of prize giving, is chaired by Fintan O'Toole on Thursday. It will involve Prof Frank Kermode, Kate Mosse, author and cofounder of the Orange Prize for fiction, Deirdre Ellis-King of the IMPAC-Dublin Corporation award, and Eddie Holt, communications analyst and Irish Times contributor.
There will be several launches during the week, including new collections from Galway poet Rita Ann Higgins (An Awful Racket, published by Bloodaxe Books) and Caitriona O'Reilly.
Science fiction, horror fiction and crime writer enthusiasts are well looked after, while there is an afternoon of children's readings on Saturday with Carolyn Swift, Kate Thompson and Eddie Lenihan in the Galway Arts Centre's gallery in Dominick Street. Patrick Deeley, Loughrea poet and author of the recently published children's book, The Lost Orchard by O'Brien Press, gives a lunchtime reading with Siobhan Campbell on Wednesday
The children's readings next Saturday are free, and Helen Carey would, if she could, have many more events like that. She firmly believes that free admission is an imperative if art is to thrive and change.
This year's festival has its first writer-in-residence, Bob Flynn of the Guardian, New Statesman, Evening Standard and the Scotsman, who has been charged with "sketching the colour of Cuirt", as chronicler of the "official and unofficial" programme. Ms Carey has further plans. The arts centre has begun a programme of literature during the past year, and she hopes to expand this into another event in the autumn.
Running on adrenalin, she is looking forward to the alchemy - the magic that cannot be planned. And she'll weather the criticism, if it comes. One of her many experiences during her time in England was management of a football team in an east London hostel. "It was part of an arts project, the idea being that life of an organisation is enhanced by team spirit," she explains.
"It was good fun, though they all wanted to score the goals, and we spent a lot of time before the Football Association's disciplinary committee. We never won a match, and I spent a lot of time trying to break up fights. Great preparation for Galway, I suppose."
The Cuirt International Festival of Literature 2001 (April 23rd to 29th) will be opened tonight in the Galway Arts Centre by film director Nicola Bruce. It is grant- aided by the Arts Council, Galway Corporation and Galway County Council. Tickets for most events (some are sold out) are available at the Town Hall Theatre, Courthouse Square, Galway, at (091) 569777 or 565886.