On Hosting: Moonlighting as an Event Host

When I began publishing my writing, I started getting asked to read at events. Occasionally, to speak on panels. I remember an old boss once overhearing me mention this. ‘I can’t imagine it!’ he said. ‘You barely speak at work!’ 


It was true: at the time I was still very much in the throes of a debilitating shyness that marked most of my younger life. There were certain situations, frequently professional situations, in which an expectation to speak would render me fully mute. In meetings I would mentally will myself to participate. Say something, I would think. Say anything! The more I pressured myself to speak, the less capable of speaking I was. I was working very hard to verbally participate in conversations in a way that was entirely invisible. The notion of public speaking, of giving a presentation or standing in front of a room full of people, would instil me with so much fear I would have to make a conscious effort not to be sick. 


And so I still find it extremely funny that I now have an academic job where public speaking is quite an everyday activity, and one that (mostly) no longer makes me feel sick. 


One of the ways that public speaking has become a large part of my professional life is hosting events. Hosting literary events feels both an extension and an intersection of my work as a lecturer and as a fiction writer, and it is something I take very seriously (perhaps pathetically so).


When I say literary events I mean an event in which an author/s is usually promoting a new book, and is interviewed about it. They tend to happen in bookshops, though not always. The format is generally 45 to 90 minutes – I once worked with someone who posed the ideal length is ‘a therapist’s hour’ i.e. 50 minutes. The format tends to stay the same: the event host introduces the event and author, interviews them, then opens up the floor for audience questions, before closing out the event.


Being an event host requires multiple skills. I remember panic Googling ‘how to host a literary event’ when first asked, wondering why there wasn’t a Quora page dedicated to this. I did however find Jen Michalski’s essay ‘How To Host A Literary Event’. Michalski writes: 

I learned that being a host means more than reading the authors’ bios. Hosts not only manage an event’s pacing (including keeping readers to their allotted times), but also set the mood, by knowing when to step up and create excitement and when to stand back to avoid drawing attention to themselves. It can be a tough balance, and it’s different for every reading.

But there’s more to it than that. You have to write the event questions: designing them so they speak for you and the audience, for the reader and for the not-yet reader. You have to balance originality with ensuring the questions are not too esoteric or overly complicated so as to alienate the audience (or even the author you are in conversation with!). 

I asked my colleague, poet Andrew McMillan how he found hosting an event as opposed to being the subject of an event, and he told me he found hosting events harder, due to the amount of work and diversity of skills you must draw from. ‘Pastoral and intellectual care of the authors, reading the books and thoroughly preparing beforehand, holding the mood and temperature of the audience, knowing when it’s time for the last question etc., knowing when to push the subject to dig a little deeper into a question.’  He likened being the host of an event to the stress of throwing a party, something I definitely relate to. You have a certain responsibility for the comfort of everyone attending – the author and the guests. You want to ensure the event feels inclusive, accessible, engaging – fun?!

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Above all, there’s a performative aspect to event hosting. You are not yourself when you host an event, and this is part of the job. You perform the role of convivial host. There is emotional labour, even self-abnegation, as you must swallow your own nerves in order to make the author (or authors) you are interviewing feel more comfortable. There are the strange moments before an event, where you are usually given some time to speak with the author you are interviewing before you host the event. Often you’re meeting the author for the first time. It can be a tricky conversation to navigate. You can't talk too much about the things you might naturally talk to a fellow author about in ordinary circumstances (‘How is publication going?’ ‘What are you working on now?’) as these are the sorts of questions you may need to ‘save’ for the ‘real’ conversation in front of a seated audience, shortly afterwards. But also, you want to establish some sense of warmth between yourself and the author you are interviewing.      

I started thinking about hosting events as a mode of performance. In Daniel Schulz’s Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance, he writes:

The hunger for authentic experience is present in many areas of cultural production, not just in art, literature and television but also in everyday practices. As Baudrillard has it, a culture that lacks robust everyday experiences, which are perceived as authentic, will reinvent simulacra of authentic everyday experiences.

Schulz then introduces the idea of ‘fake authentic’, in which experiences are ‘authentically reproduced’ or ‘Disneyfied’ in general. This kind of performance is something I am interested in, in my writing. My last novel, The Odyssey, was set on a cruise ship, in which everything was a fake version of what is purported to be. The novel I am currently writing is set in a fictionalised version of the very real American town Leavenworth — a Bavarian-themed town just outside of Seattle. I find the idea of facsimile and simulacra both attractive and repellent, and am interested in what repeat exposure to places, events or products that reproduce a version of something they are pretending to be does to how we relate to the wider world. 

Schulz goes on to say there is an assumption in performance, that the performance is not authentic, that it is ‘fake and unreal because actors pretend to be somebody who they are not’. This rings true for me when it comes to hosting literary events: when I host an event I am performing a kind of confidence, fluidity and ease that absolutely feels like I am pretending to be somebody I am not. There is certainly the argument that all social interactions are a kind of performance, but there is a heightened feel to when hosting an event: you are seated if not on a literal stage, then at least on a kind of makeshift stage. Either way there is an expectation you are performing something, in the dramatic production sense. 

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But there’s an aspect of self-erasure to this work, too. An expectation to assume the role of the unruffled dinner party host: affectless and calm, topping up everyone else’s drinks, serving your guests first. It can feel cringe-inducing when the event host speaks too much about themselves, too much of their own work or experiences of writing, rather than maintaining the focus of the event on the subject at hand.

When I began researching this piece, a friend pointed me towards Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on hospitality. Derrida applies the idea of hospitality across different contexts in which a ‘host’ welcomes a ‘guest’ across a ‘border’, ranging from welcoming guests into your home to hosting refugees into a country. Derrida:

Hospitality in theory and practice relates to crossing boundaries (‘Come in, come in’) or thresholds…including those between the self or other, private and public, inside and outside, individual and collective, personal and political etc…

I am interested in what the border or boundary of a literary event might be, and whether as the host of the event, I am responsible for welcoming guests into it. I feel that to attend a literary event is to enter a kind of bubble: both literally (the event space) and immaterially (to enter into a particular social code). But the parameters of the bubble might vary.

As much as I am aware of myself performing a kind of role as the event host, I am also aware of the event guests perhaps performing a kind of role. There is an expectation in how one should behave at a literary event, the sort of questions it is appropriate to ask. The space in which an event is held, also informs this. There is more of a conditioned feeling of properness, a certain mannered expectation, when events are held in bookshops or academic spaces, and the questions and behaviour of the panel bends to this. There is an expectation not to include politically provocative or controversial questions. However, when I have hosted or spoken at events in less traditional spaces (or in spaces where there is a bar!), there is a looser, less formal feeling. Other bits of marketing ephemera can alter the mood of these spaces and the kind of questions that are asked. I once spoke on a panel promoting Phoebe Waller Bridge’s Fleabag screenplays, in which guests were given ‘goodie bags’ with miniature bottles of alcohol and lipstick. As a result, the tone was a little giddy, fangirly even. It’s hard to imagine what the equivalent goodie for say, Jesse Armstrong’s Succession screenplays might look like – and how this might inform the tone of an event dedicated to its promotion.

Derrida outlines a difference between conditional hospitality, in which conditions or restrictions are expected, and unconditional, or ‘pure’ hospitality, in which there are no conditions: ‘For unconditional hospitality to take place, you have to accept the risk of the other coming and destroying the place’.  A literary event falls under the title of conditional hospitality. A sort of contract of behaviour is entered into on attending: you shouldn’t contain spoilers in your question, you shouldn’t ask anything invasive or personal. 

You are also hosting the writer of the event – the event subject – but again, this is a conditional form of hospitality. I remember one particular event in which the writer turned one of the questions back on to me, asking how I felt as a writer on that particular topic. It felt almost a breach of social and professional contract. I am the host! I ask the questions! I found it strangely usurping; casting around, attempting to cobble together an answer as a sudden and reluctant subject. 

Everyone has experienced a gut-level panic when a participant transgresses these borders, these conditions, either by using the event in order to platform themselves (‘as a writer myself’) or to ask a sort of self-aggrandising question demonstrating their close knowledge of a particular subject. It is often up to the event host to manage these moments.

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Years ago,  I attended an event with the writer Sara Ahmed. One of the event guests – a disgruntled former student of Ahmed’s – raised her hand during the Q&A segment to bring up a personal and professional grievance. The event host, Muzna Rahman, a Lecturer in English Literature, has since become a colleague and friend, so I asked her how she felt at this moment, what responsibilities she felt she had, and to whom.


‘I felt my heart rate rise but I knew my face had immobilised into an expressionless mask,’ she told me. ‘I did not know what to do, or how my subject wanted me to react. I did not know how the audience wanted me to react. I didn’t know how the university at large would want me to react, at such a public event. I did however feel a responsibility in all these directions, and in the middle of all this din there was me – new, young, keen to impress and not fuck up this early in the job.’

Balancing the expectations of multiple participants is no easy feat, and the task becomes harder when such participants are also stakeholders who are financially invested in the success of an event. Muzna’s invocation of how the university hosting the event might expect her to handle the event complicates matters further: presumably, in this instance, it would have been the university footing the bill. How does this inform the mood and temperature of an event? Thinking back to the Fleabag event I previously mentioned, I remember feeling ambivalent about attending the event hosted and paid for by Waller-Bridges’s publisher in the immediate aftermath of the classist Saturday Night Live appearance had she made, particularly given the social codes that inform these events; the expectation of an uncritical celebration of the subject.

Muzna also spoke to me about the possible cultural and racial differences which may be at play in addressing the labour of event hosting, telling me she feels she is capable of drawing people out in a relatively unconscious way. ‘I am good at asking probing questions,’ she said. ‘I sometimes think this might be a cultural difference – in Bangladesh, people ask deeply intimate questions of each other all the time, in even the most mundane interactions. The British do not do this, generally. Sometimes I think being a person of colour makes you comfortable with being invisible, better able to erase yourself and privilege another’s mind, thoughts, and words over your own, which often makes a good interview. Maybe that’s a bit cynical. Maybe I am just good at it.’

How much does identity comes into play when hosting an event? Am I more aware of my own conscious act of self-erasure because I’m a middle class white woman? Surely everyone is interested in my thoughts!

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Further, on the matter of remuneration.: some of the events I have hosted have been unpaid, and some have been paid – anywhere between £50.00 to £250.00. 

I would very rarely now take unpaid writing work, but I feel in hosting events there is something reciprocal that allows me to make the justification. There is a lovely camaraderie in hosting events, in the ability to support authors whose work you admire. Over the last twelve months or so I have hosted events with Eliza Clark, Megan Nolan, Sophie Mackintosh, Rebecca Johnson – all authors I would be reading and whose work I would be thinking about anyway. Often the authors you have hosted an event for, then host an event for you. It can be an equitable game.  But I do wonder if, somehow, a more authentic form of engagement occurs when events are not remunerated: in these contexts I am less aware of producing ‘value for money’ to whoever might be paying my fee (usually the publisher) and so less conscious of delivering an event with obviously marketable attributes. There is more freedom; room for more of a wandering conversation and the opportunity to feel partof a wider community of writers. I am a firm subscriber to Sheila Heti’s belief that you can never be lonely as a writer, because you are perpetually in conversation with yourself, and quite enjoy the solitude of writing, but it can feel quite an isolating endeavour. Living in Manchester, I also feel very outside of the London publishing bubble. Hosting events has offered me the chance to feel a sense of belonging. 

Something that perhaps feels less comfortable to talk about (but decidedly disingenuous to not talk about) is that hosting events or participating in events can be a good networking opportunity (!). I often think as writers we do not like to think of ourselves as subject to the same sticky politics of other businesses – but of course, publishing books is a business, and is subject to the same capitalist machinations as every other trade or industry. An author who you have hosted an event for is then perhaps an author you can send your next book to in view of requesting a cover blurb, or an author who might invite you to a future festival they are curating, now that you are on their radar. And it is a form of cultural capital, which tends to be the currency that most writers trade in: a means towards boosting your own profile. It feels remiss to not acknowledge the professional opportunities that are afforded through hosting events. 

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I always demand a kind of performance review from friends who have attended my events, in a way that I wouldn’t dream of requesting from friends who have read my written work. I suppose I am more aware that I am performing a type of labour when I’m hosting an event that produces a more direct sense of value – community value. I recently attended an event in which the journalist and memoirist Terri White hosted a Q&A with the previously mentioned Armstrong. I was excited to attend this event, the first book event I would go to after a busy summer hosting events. I found myself studying White – a consummate professional and dab hand at event hosting – trying to pick up some tips. I found myself cataloguing the work and skill that went into the event: the way she managed the audience questions, in the way she put Armstrong at ease - a particular balance of humour that was at once wry, gently teasing and generous - and in how she made the subject matter feel everyday and accessible. Much of the labour, I found myself thinking, was invisible. I thought back to my days of extreme shyness, how hard it was to form a sentence. That old metaphor of the swimming duck: the appearance of moving calmly through the water, its paddling feet going like the clappers, obscured underneath.

Lara Williams is a writer based in Manchester.  She has written a short story collection (Treats, Freight Books, 2016) and two novels (Supper Club, Hamish Hamilton, 2019 and The Odyssey, Hamish Hamilton, 2022), and has been translated into eight languages.

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