IRISH writers made a big impact at the New Yorker Festival held last weekend. Booker prize winners Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright, as well as Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon all spoke at the magazine's annual festival.

Doyle, one of Ireland's best known and best loved writers, has written for the prestigious magazine a number of times over the years, while Enright, who shot to fame in Ireland when she won the Booker Prize in 2007 for her novel The Gathering, has also written short stories for the magazine. Indeed, the magazine has published quite a number of Irish writers over the years. Colm Toibin, William Trevor and John Banville, as well as one of Ireland's leading journalists, Fintan O'Toole, have all appeared in the magazine.

At a talk called "Family Secrets," which was moderated by Willing Davidson, who works at The New Yorker fiction department, Doyle, along with Enright and American short story writer Tobias Wolfe, spoke about the challenges - and joys - of writing about families.

Doyle in particular delighted the crowd when he spoke movingly about his own family, displaying that unique brand of Dublin humor that has become his trademark. Is he conscious of avoiding Irish family stereotypes in his work?

His own family background was itself entirely unremarkable, Doyle explained. His parents married in 1951, they still live in the same house they first moved in to, and hold hands when they walk down the street.

"It's as stereotypical an Irish family as you can come across really," he told the audience of just under 300 people at the Cedar Lake Theater in midtown Manhattan. "I grew up with fish on a Friday and shepherd's pie on a Tuesday. If I suffered from amnesia, I could sniff the air and somehow know what day of the week it was."

Although his own family background has been happy and uncomplicated, Doyle has written about alcoholic mothers and fathers, abusive fathers, unmarried pregnancies, and "families imploding and exploding."

"I just find it more interesting, really," he said. "I suppose it puts me on edge. I've never really been interested in trying to capture how I grew up."

When asked if her work is anyway autobiographical Enright, whose novel The Gathering was about a sister mourning the suicide of her alcoholic brother, her current answer, she explained, is "I hope not."

But because she writes in a highly-autobiographical voice, she said, people expect her to use her own family for the basis of her work. Indeed, after her sister read The Gathering, Enright received a text message from her saying, "Book very good and not overly autobiographical."

Doyle also explained that readers expect his stories to draw on his own background. After his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha for which he won the 1993 Booker prize, he received a letter from an Australian woman, he said, who told him how much she loved his book and that she hoped "his life was better now."

And after his debut novel The Commitments in 1987, people assumed "that I was one of the Commitments," Doyle said, despite not being able to play an instrument or sing. "Journalists were often quite annoyed that I wasn't.I enjoyed getting up their noses."

Although Doyle is one of Ireland's most popular writers, he explained that the reaction to some of his work has not always been favorable. Following a 1994 TV series called Family which inspired his book The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, which tells a Dublin woman's experience of domestic violence, Doyle said that he even received death threats because of his work.

Irish people, he said, were shocked that a man hitting his wife could be depicted on TV. The reaction "was quite extraordinary.It was as if I said something that shouldn't be said."

Enright, who wrote a number of critically acclaimed but only moderately commercially successful novels before her breakthrough The Gathering in 2007, complained of the sexism that she had encountered as a woman writer.

"People ask me things they'd never ask a male writer," she said. "Like, 'What does your husband think of this?' and 'What do you tell your children?'"

Enright, whose material is often described as dark, also said that because she is a woman, "People want me to be nice. And they never asked Beckett to be nice. So why are they asking me to be nice?"

Nice, perhaps not, but Enright certainly demonstrated her formidable intellect and wit.

It was perhaps fitting that the day after Paul Muldoon's talk with Seamus Heaney, entitled "History and Homeland," was the anniversary of one of the key events of the Northern Ireland troubles. On October 5, 1968, the police in Northern Ireland attacked a civil rights march in Derry (or Londonderry, depending on your political persuasion, as Heaney pointed out), an event which was one of the sparks that ignited four decades of political violence.

Heaney talked about how the Good Friday Agreement had transformed the political landscape of Northern Ireland, and about his somewhat complicated relationship with his home country. "Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic," he said, drawing a distinction between "hope" and "optimism."

Hope, he said, requires work and commitment. He also noted that although the provisional IRA were killing people in the name of other Irish people, he "couldn't deny the foundational aspects" of its struggle.

Despite not living in the Republic of Ireland for many years, Heaney said that he "began to feel less at home when the country became prosperous." (Now that the country is officially in recession, perhaps he might feel more at home there the next time he visits.)

Heaney, who at the age of 69 looks as sharp as ever, reciting effortlessly a number of his poems, received a standing ovation from the crammed lecture hall of just under 600 people.