"I happen to be in love with dictators," says Moses Isegawa, a Ugandan author whose life had been shaped by the likes of former dictator Idi Amin, and who eventually left his home country to write from abroad.

"When they say ‘Let there be rain’, there is rain. When they say ‘Let there be famine’, there is famine, and 100,000 people will die."

Though still only 46 years old, he worries constantly about old age, his prostate and the future or the lack thereof, of the 600-page novel. Though he grew up in an ugly dictatorship, Isegawa seems to have escaped with his wit intact.

He sees beauty to write about in ugliness and in life in the raw.

"When 20 people defecate in a row, there is some beauty," he told his fellow panelists and visitors to the Galle Literary Festival 2009, who were debating the role of a writer in a public crisis, and were struggling to make the connection.

Tahmima Anam, a Bangladeshi-born novelist and writer feels strongly that someone from outside can speak out and should when tyranny and corruption rules at home.

"We are the people who have a voice," she says of writers who reside abroad. "You will not be killed. You will not be accused and tortured."

She disagrees with Isegawa, who says every tragedy, tragic though it may be, is just fodder for the next novel or piece of written work. And no, he’s not ashamed for seeing the world that way, he assures us, in case anyone wondered.

"Every word is a vote," insists Anam.

V V Ganeshanthan, whose debut novel Love Marriage was published only last year and lives in the US, wonders whether someone resident outside can really represent what the people inside a country experiences.

For Sri Lankans in the audience, the debate seemed to strike a chord. It was only weeks earlier that Lasantha Wickrematunga, editor of The Sunday Leader newspaper was killed by armed gunmen in broad daylight.

Another editor was assaulted within days, together with his wife. A dozen journalists and media workers have been killed in recent years, and nobody has been convicted.

Media rights bodies have named Sri Lanka as one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, after Iraq.

But The Galle Literary Festival, now in its third year, seems to take place in a parallel universe.

It is a place for book lovers to see and meet some of their favourite authors in the flesh. Over four packed days, fans can meet with, dine with, discuss and debate with popular authors of English literature.

Geoffery Dobbs, a hotelier, who founded the festival partly to promote Galle, a popular tourist city, says the festival is to celebrate the English language. It has attracted visitors, authors and poets from far and wide.

A participant of this year’s festival was Tarun Tejpal, founder journalist of crusading Indian weekly Tehelka, and author of The Story of my Assassins.

Tejpal says journalists have a responsibility to expand the flow of information and find new ways to do this, even in the face of great odds.

Tehelka, which started life as a news website and was then launched as a weekly magazine has seen its share of hostilities, having been forced to shut down briefly some years ago following an expose on corruption in defense procurements.

A compliment perhaps to a magazine that sells just 100,000 copies a week in India, which has a population of a billion people.

Size doesn’t really matter. "What matters at the end of the day is the power of a story, no matter the medium. Write a good story and it will travel. The main job is to influence power and policy making," says Tejpal.

Indi Samarajiva, a blogger who created kottu.org, an online Sri Lankan blog community and has been blogging for over 5 years, says it is a useful alternative to mainstream media.

"Technology is taking us back to a vibrant media culture." But the reason bloggers in Sri Lanka are still safe, Samarajiva says, is probably because "we’re irrelevant."

Can journalism actually shape events? At the end of the day, as Tejpal says, journalists are just mavericks, with an exaggerated social conscience, trying to live by a set of ideals.

But perhaps, that’s what it takes.