City of the scribes

Savage words were uttered in a whisper: her audience sat rapt as Marina Carr read softly from Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats, an emissary from a harshly drawn, pitiless landscape: "I'll break your spirit and glue ye back the way I want you."

It was an intense hour-and-three-quarters on Sunday afternoon, as Carr and the Nigerian-Irish poet and playwright, Gabriel Gbadomosi, read from their work and discussed it with poet and playwright, Vincent Woods. The intimacy of Druid Lane Theatre and the engaging question-and-answer session made this closing reading one of the most stimulating events of the six-day Cuirt International Festival of Literature. As the sun finally broke through we left the theatre in a state of anticipation for Carr's new play, On Raftery's Hill, which opens next week at Druid Lane, and for Gbadomosi's play, Asylum, which will be premiered as part of a series on exile at Lyric Theatre, Belfast later in the year.

Hearing these playwrights talk illuminatingly about their work, about their poetic language and the sources of "the lyric impulse", highlighted what had been missing from many of the other events of the past days: the element of dialogue, discussion and direct connection with the audience. To watch two often very different writers read extracts from their work on a bare stage, without interaction with each other, and line up to sign books afterwards, can be an arid, somewhat frustrating experience; if the author is not a good performer, it's hard not to think that one might be better off reading the work oneself at home.

Sometimes the pairings were effective: the reading by UCD writer-in-residence, Conor O'Callaghan and the English poet Hugo Williams, benefited from the juxtaposition of their very distinct, highly accomplished, poetic voices, which intersected and resonated in surprising ways. Likewise, Colum McCann, who read from his new book, Every- thing in this Country Must, with that fearless anatomiser of emotional pain, the Scottish novelist, A.L. Kennedy.

These were the exceptions, however. On the whole, while one of the charms of Cuirt is its direct access to writers without an intervening layer of theorists and scholars, a further degree of mediation and structured engagement between audience and writer would have made it a much more rewarding festival. Many of the sessions cried out for a chairperson and were lost opportunities for connection between authors and their readers.

A potentially interesting morning discussion on the publishing industry brought together two publishers with radically different experience: Neil Belton, publishing director of Granta Books, and Jessie Lendennie of Salmon poetry publishers. The presence of a chairperson would have helped enormously; instead the discussion was disappointingly unfocused.

The festival's new director, Helen Carey, says that in future years "there should be more discourse. Of course, first of all the festival is a celebration of good writing, but it should also become a showcase and an important forum." Having lived and worked in London for the past 12 years, she feels the need "to gain a better sense of what's going on here, to understand the cultural cross-currents".

She was appointed as director of Galway Arts Centre last November and began programming in late January, which made the planning for this year's festival something of a scramble. Certainly, the line-up of visiting authors was less star-studded than in previous years, and many people attending expressed disappointment about that.

"You can't get the big international names at such short notice," Carey says. "These things don't just get pulled out of a hat. Anyway, what's important is good literature. I was thrilled with the people who came, and I think there are some real jewels in the programme, but of course the planning of the festival needed more time, and needed to be better publicised. The Galway Arts Centre has been going through a period of transition, and the building was being refurbished. I knew when I took the job that it was going to be a blitz to programme the festival in time. I've been thrown in at the deep end - and learned a lot."

One of the "big names" this year was author and academic, Germaine Greer, who was very warmly received on Wednesday night, and would have been even more so had the audience in the packed Town Hall Theatre known that she had gone through the ordeal of an assault at her home in Essex two nights before. She was in pugilistic mode, presenting a funny and typically forceful attack on biographical writing in general and literary biography in particular.

"There is no value in literary biography, in my view. It conceals a desire to reduce the subject of the biography to size, to explain him or her away. Biographers haven't got talent so they take their revenge on their subjects by saying that there wasn't a lot to them anyway." Her main point, which she reiterated with pedagogical thoroughness, was that all non-fictional writing, including biography, was a construction which uses the devices of fiction to impose narrative structure and shape onto human lives, which are amorphous.

`Biography is a maddening genre that reduces the quiddity and multiplicity of a person. Writing about people who are still alive is a vile business: the author is safe as houses, but the subject can't hide, can't defend its kernel of truth."

She illustrated this by citing nine different books written about her - or in which she appeared as a character - refuting their veracity in detail while maintaining that she hadn't read them and that anyone was free to write about her. For Greer, the division of writing into fiction and non-fiction was nonsensical, "a difference of convention rather than a difference in essence".

John Waters, in his humorously self-deprecating presentation of his work in conjunction with the comic novelist Eamon Sweeney, said that while a book such as his Jiving At The Crossroads had the texture of a novel, he could not write fiction, he was "a failed novelist". Instead he wrote radio plays for BBC Radio 4, reaching an audience of half a million people. "But I never meet anyone who's ever heard any of them, probably because they never leave the house."

This year's Cuirt embraced crime writers, including John Connolly, Ken Bruen and Mark Timlin, writers who graft on Grub Street, emerging writers such as comedian Tommy Tiernan, whose first novel is due later in the year, and what Douglas Kennedy, in a richly allusive presentation described as "serious popular fiction" - the category in which he placed his own novels.

"I'm an old-fashioned exponent of narrative fiction. I believe that novels are not about ideas, they're about stories. We have this notion that if it's art, it has to be hard, or at least lyrical. But you can have it both ways: popular novels can be serious and vice versa."

The stories he told were based on crises, he said, on his observation that human lives are "riddled with darkness, even the apparently perfect life. You never really know anyone else, and we can't control life's random forces. The well-ordered life can be pulled apart by a random action. Everything can change, you can flip, the veneer of respectability can collapse."

Self-deprecation seemed to be the favoured, or even required mode, for authors' presentation during the week: Douglas Kennedy concluded by suggesting modestly that "writers should be read and not seen". But he didn't really seem to believe that, and luckily for all the literary devotees, nobody else at Cuirt did either.