There's a pronounced North American twang to the Gala Closing Event of the Dublin Writers Festival at the Gate theatre. It's Sunday, the fourth and final day of events, and the turn of New York poet and author Billy Collins, Michigan-based writer Thomas Lynch, Canadian Alistair MacLeod (winner of this year's International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) and Dublin poet Paula Meehan to entertain the audience with their wit and poetic insights. Pat Boran, programme director, greets the audience and tells of how he's delighted and exhausted after the 'celebrity madness' that was Yeats is Dead! the previous night, and a marathon afternoon session with German poet and broadcaster Michael Augustin is not. "I write because I don't play golf," he jokes. Harpist Deirdre Seaver follows Lynch on stage, and then the author of No Great Mischief, Alistair MacLeod, faces the audience. Tonight's performance is less boisterous than the previous night's at the IMPAC awards dinner at Dublin Castle, when the MacLeod Clan - Alistair, his wife, their six children and partners and extended family members - took to the floor and entertained the guests with a knees-up jig. Dublin poet Paula Meehan reads her work after the interval, and is followed by Billy Collins, who keeps the audience giggling with his wry and irreverent humour. Among the audience are Jack Gilligan, festival director; Michael Davitt, Irish-language poet; Lord Mayor of Dublin, Maurice Ahern and his wife Moira, poet Theo Dorgan and American poet Ron Houchin. Afterwards it's on to a reception at the Cobalt CafΘ on North Great George's Street. Swathed in candlelight, writers, poets and organisers of the festival gather with glasses of wine. Thomas Lynch, who's heading off to his house in west Clare the next morning, stands chatting with writer Alison Kennedy, and together with Billy Collins, all three slip out to the garden.