"My event is the only one that fucks": inside London's hot new literary scenes

Not so long ago, London’s literary scene was uncool. Its events were fusty, moribund affairs, where dowdy men and women in tweed jackets and moth-eaten knitwear would gather in bookshops, drink lukewarm wine from plastic glasses and return home by 10 p.m. But now, thanks to a slate of buzzy new reading nights where writers and poets perform their work, literature is back — and this time it’s not boring. These events are as raucous as any queer techno night, as glamorous as any fashion party. Far from being bookish nerds, the people who attend them are young, stylish and attractive. They have sex.

This is the emerging narrative around London’s new literary scene, which includes nights like Soho Reading Series, Deleted Scenes, New Papers, Rivet Reads, Adult Entertainment and New Work, all of which have emerged in the last three years. Featuring readings by both established and emerging writers, these events are busy and popular; unlike the scantly-attended book launches and stuffy lectures that once constituted the capital’s literature scene, they often sell out, standing room only. 

These events seem like, and in many cases explicitly are, a deliberate attempt to import the energy of the downtown New York scene. With its raucous literary parties, glitzy book launches and buzzy reading events, NYC was, for a long time, a source of envy for many Londoners interested in that sort of thing, who felt the literary culture of their own city to be embarrassingly dreary by comparison. Now, it seems that the shoe is on the other foot: “New York is very quiet now, and the energy's in London,” Tom Willis, who founded Soho Reading Series and splits his time between the two cities, tells me.

But alongside the hype, there have already been rumblings of a backlash: one review of Soho Reading Series, posted on Reddit, took exception to both the quality of the writing and the class status of the attendees, described as “rich young people”, “toffish men” and “the hereditary elite”.  Still, even this negative account, which the author acknowledges may have been informed by a feeling of envy, doesn’t quite undercut the hype around Soho Reading Series — to paraphrase John Berger, being envied by people you don’t care about is the definition of glamour, and I’m not sure how many people in attendance that night would take exception to being thought of as “modish” and “thin”.

I had been aware of these new reading events myself for quite a while — it seemed like a new one popped up on my Instagram feed every other week — and I felt ambivalent about them. An attempt to emulate the New York scene struck me as contrived, even a little undignified; besides, a literary scene dominated, I assumed, by people who went to Oxford and Cambridge hardly represented a radical break with the status quo. More than anything, I was sceptical that these events were as glamorous, cool and sexy as people were claiming, or that these qualities were even important. So why, exactly, are reading series suddenly so popular — and already controversial? Are we simply making an already elitist scene even more stratified? And when people are reading less than ever before, is a literary event that "fucks" what we need to turn things around?