India, July 4 -- Wandering through Kathmandu's winding lanes, tucking into carrot cake at one of Thamel's many trendy cafes, and caught amid the crush of devotees at the Pashupatinath temple, one is filled with admiration for Nepal and its people. It's no surprise that this ancient capital was the epicentre of the Gen Z-led revolution of 2025. Young people are everywhere: in the restaurants serving excellent Maithili and Thakali thalis, at homey bars overlooking old step wells, and hugging happy street dogs. Plenty of them are also in attendance at the Himalayan Literature Festival & Writers' Workshop organised by the city's White Lotus Book Shop and poet Yuyutsu Sharma. Held from May 29 to June 5 at Hotel Malla and other venues in the city, the event hosted masterclasses, poetry readings and discussions with a range of authors from around the world, including Paul Muldoon and Anne Casey. Particularly interesting was the Poetry Film Festival segment that showcased, among others, Carola Mair's Wide Awake (2025), a documentary on the Austrian author Bodo Hell, who disappeared in the Alps in 2024. It presents the man as he was: vital, inspirational, and deeply connected to the land. Land, of course, has inspired great art and also terrible violence, as the Indian subcontinent knows. This has been the case in another partitioned corner of the world too. In the Mapping & Memoir Writing session, Books Editor at The Irish Times, Martin Doyle spoke movingly about growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and '80s. "I was Catholic and Irish. That meant I was discriminated against, called names, and abused, basically, just for being who I was," he said. His memoir, Dirty Linen, recalls the violence in his fractured neighbourhood. But Doyle doesn't hold on to hatred. "To me, people who cross the divide, whether Catholic (reaching out) to Protestant or Protestant to Catholic, they are the mortar that holds the bricks of society together. They are the best of us. That's my point. Even though all these terrible things were happening, there were still friendships," he said. Violent conflict might have been dialled down in Doyle's part of the world, but it rages on elsewhere. "I come to you from the United States, a place where I believe that there is great conflict right now... the greatest conflict that we have ever experienced in our US history," said poet Tina Chang. She then read from her friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K Smith's The Goddess Speaks of Union: ".Meet me where struggle falls away. / Meet me where the blade of reason and the knife of pride shatter into mist. / My child loves creation./ You who believe yourself small at my feet, be large, open wide like a road, wider, a field. / Flood yourself, / pour through us and into us." All of which brings one to the question: In a world of constant conflict, do art, culture, literature and poetry matter? "I am always perplexed by the indefatigable question: Does poetry matter? Why not ask, does memory matter? Does resilience matter? Do anxiety, hope, courage, wisdom and emotional stamina matter?" wondered Tracy K Smith, during her keynote address. "To care about poetry is to listen in earnest to another person's testimony and to draw that awareness in toward your own emotional fortitude, imagination, patience and empathy. To care about poetry is to attend to a host of complex faculties that equip you to consider yourself alongside and in light of equally worthy others." In the unforeseeable future those "equally worthy others" just might include AI. "People will be raised as cyborgs. They won't care, as much as we do, whether art is organic," said poet and academic Tony Barnstone, during his lecture, Androids, Robots and Cyborgs: Creativity in the Time of AI. "We cannot tell what the art of the future will be. but we're human. We need creativity," he said, adding that trouble is what makes humanity create. "We're in maybe more trouble than the human race has ever been in. That means we have to be creative. Trouble is the gift that is going to force us to be creative in ways we've never imagined... If modernism was great because of photography, just imagine what the new art will be," Barnstone said. It's an optimistic thought to hold on to as one leaves the festival behind, the head still full of lines of poetry, ideas about robot-assisted creativity, visuals of Bodo Hell following his lowing cattle into the mountains, and many, many pictures of Kathmandu....