IF THIS YEAR'S Cúirt set some tongues wagging about a programme that seeped into music, dance, theatre and song, it was clear by the end of the week-long festival that literature remained very much at its heart., writes FIONA McCANN

And the more than 5,000 audience members who bought tickets to the various venues and events were not complaining. Yes, there was music in the varied voices of the 60-odd artists who convened for the event – in the Scottish purr of Janice Galloway, the Yorkshire baritone of Sean O’Brien, or the Derry lilt of Colette Bryce and in the changing cadences of Spanish, Slovenian, Irish and all the varied Englishes that were spoken and sung all over Galway as the week progressed.

The link between music and literature was even more clearly articulated at the “Conversation” between novelist Joseph O’Connor and musician and film-maker Philip King. As O’Connor read his prose, King provided a harmonica counterpoint, with the notes and his song bleeding into O’Connor’s reading, blurring the distance between the genres and pointing up the shifting borders of literature.

In their conversation, too, was talk of this overlap, the music in words and the storytelling in songs that can be echoed in writing. “The test for any piece of writing is, could it be told as an Irish ballad?” O’Connor contended, pointing to the importance of music to many of Ireland’s greatest writers, including Joyce and Synge, and questioning how far such men would have come without “the beautiful corpus of work in song”.

Music as a literary theme was there, in Don Paterson's tribute to an Eastern European techno musician, Love Poem for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze– "when you open up those low-pass filters in what sounds like a Minimoog emulation they seem to/ open in my heart also" – while music also took its place on the programme itself, through Buck 65's poetic hip hop and Philip King's band Scullion, who brought the festival to a rousing close on Sunday night.

THERE WAS THEATRE, TOO, in this literary festival: in the readings of Brian Friel's plays, in the performances by Mephisto Theatre Company, by The Gombeens, and by Galway Youth Theatre, whose production of A Midsummer Night's Dream had audience rhapsodising for days. And who could argue against the presence of Shakespeare or Friel at a literary event? There was theatre in literary adaptations and the dramas at Cúirt inspired by literary works, and often even in the readings themselves: the pauses and gestures of Carol Ann Duffy's poised delivery, Louis De Bernière's convincing personification of an elderly General losing his marbles, Claire Keegan's comic timing.

Film had its place, too, packing out the Nun’s Island Theatre with screenings of movies by Pat Collins and Philip King about the lives of some of Ireland’s most beloved writers.

In fact, this year’s festival’s wide embrace and its expansion of the notion of how literature can be offered and accessed was a conscious decision on the part of Maureen Kennelly, in her first year as festival programme director.

“I wanted to bring other art forms in,” she said. “There are different ways by which people can discover literature. This is especially the case with the film screenings. Being introduced in quite an intimate way to those writers’ lives is very likely to prompt people to read more of the work, which can only be good. ”

In search of this encounter with literature, audiences moved along all the differing paths on offer to the words at the heart of Cúirt, and to the writers who wrote them. Because for Kennelly, there are any numbers of ways to come at literature, and to turn festival-goers into readers.

“Firstly all the audience are listeners,” said Kennelly. “And then they turn into readers.” This alchemy was visible as audiences crowded around the bookstands in the Town Hall Theatre and found the printed versions of the words they had been introduced to at a reading or screening or play.

Yet their encounters with the writers moved beyond the page, and onto the streets of Galway city, where the invited authors were hailed by readers in bars, in restaurants, and at the after-show venue of Sheridan’s wine bar, where the space between writer and reader grew became further blurred with every libation.

During the daytime readings, however, the careful pairings curated by Kennelly paid off, as Galloway sparred with Blake Morrison on the solipsism of memoir writing, and Patrick Deeley’s grounded work was juxtaposed with the restlessness evident in that of Leontia Flynn.

CONNECTIONS BETWEENwriters were made off stage, too, as they came together outside the rooms of their own and into the shared space of Cúirt. "Observing writers mix with each other is very pleasurable," said Kennelly. "They have the opportunity [at the festival] to mix with each other and get away from writing in the lonely room. It's wonderful to watch that."

Yet most of the writers there had left their lonely rooms to find their readers, and reading their words before these Galway audiences was the opportunity to reach them in a new and vibrant way. “There’s some electrical connection that gets established,” explained American poet Jane Hirshfield of the readings. “And I’m very grateful for that.”

Janice Galloway admitted at her own reading “you’re never quite sure why people come to these things.” The answer was there in these audiences, who came to listen, to participate in the workshops hosted by Cúirt writer in residence Nuala Ní Chonchúir and by Hirshfield, to find new voices and writers and to read their own work. This latter was nowhere more evident than in a packed out Róisín Dubh where some 20 poets performed their own work for the assembled judges in the Poetry Grand Slam.

The winner this year was Dubliner Stephen James Smith, for whom the Slam is just another way into literature, a way “to get people involved and interested in poetry”.

All that was required, as Hirshfield put it, was that people bring “their close attention.” People like Janet Morrow, a repeat attendee who was thrilled that this year had offered “a really good variety”. Among her highlights was the Over the Edge readings by emerging writers because, as she explained it, “the Irish have a real gift for putting it over”.

If literature was at this festival’s heart, it was clear that the audience, the readers and consumers of literature, were what kept it beating through seven days of writers and their words on screen, in print, made flesh.

“Cúirt is a festival that arises from a genuine enthusiasm [in the audience] for the work that has been put before it,” said poet Sean O’Brien. “And that represents a model for how things should be done.”