Ms Catherine Moylan:

We have over 100 events in the short four or five days of the festival. Writing is in our DNA in Listowel. As we cannot help it, we embrace it. It is innate to everybody. Being from Listowel, part of the responsibility and what we achieve is that we support, embrace, encourage and mind the authors and audiences who visit us every year. In the 1970s and 1980s when writers such as John B. Keane rang someone like Joseph O'Connor in London and said he had an audience for him, it gave him recognition from somebody he respected and admired at the beginning of his career. The same is happening to this day.