THE Dublin Bookshop was buzz in with chat about new projects as friends and fellow writers gathered to celebrate Anne Haverty's first novel, One Day As A Tiger, a tale of love and genetic engineering. Haverty herself, joking that she was in fact in collusion with the scientists who produced Dolly the cloned sheep, is hard at work on another novel, which superstition forbade her from describing. Anne Enright, meanwhile, is converting her last novel into a screenplay with support from the Irish Film Board and working on a short story that will join pieces by Colm Toibin, Roddy Doyle, Joe O'Connor and others in Dermot Bolger's forthcoming collection, Finbar's Hotel.

Colm Toibin made a speech to send the book on its way, recalling Haverty's previous biography of Countess Markievicz. He was later spied in deep conversation with Anthony Cronin, recalling the days in Enniscorthy when Anthony taught Colm's mother shorthand, while Colm's father had instructed Anthony in English.

Tom Murphy, whose play Bailegangaire is to open soon at the Royal Court in London with a superb cast of Rosaleen Linehan, Brid Brennan and Ruth McCabe, was chatting with photographer John Minehan, famous for his portraits of Samuel Beckett among others, and now a resident of West Cork. Meanwhile poet Derek Mahon, who is working towards a new collection by the end of the year, surveyed the room with actor and director Ronan Wilmot, who has just finalised his plans to take a production of Waiting For Godot to Berlin.

Poet Micheal O Siadhail, artist Michael Kane and Duncan Stewart, architect and presenter of RTE's Our House, made up the eclectic gathering, with Eamon Dunphy paying a surprise late visit, in exuberant spirits about his new Radio Ireland show, The Last Word, which he cohosts with Ann Marie Hourihan. He admitted that it needed work as he had been "a little preoccupied lately" but claimed with some relish that the pair were going to "get more savage, we're starting to slaughter them". One presumed he meant his guests.