The Bookseller – Comment – Bringing authors into the conversation

Watching the social media streams from Jaipur dance across the screens this week, I am again delighted by the sheer jamboree energy of the great litfest celebrations. We all love the intensity of the experience that a spectacular riotous 12-ring circus gives readers and writers. And the great literary festivals always embrace their locations and cultural contexts – the easy seriousness of Louisiana, the heady Caribbean carnival buzz of Cartagena, Bradford’s dynamic urban thrill and the warm renaissance grace of Mantova.

The book event landscape here in the UK blossoms with club nights readings in bars and galleries up and down the country that’s bringing a new generation to their own literary scene, with Alex Fane making theatrical touring for popular authors a commercial smash, and with entrepreneurial indie bookshops from Book-ish in Crickhowell to Toppings – everywhere – among many, many others hosting readings every night of the year that sell books and create loyal audiences and engaged book-loving communities who love the truths that writers tell. London in particular is blessed with the Southbank Centre, Intelligence Squared, Jewish Book Week, 5×15 and terrific festivals everywhere you look.

Into this vibrant culture we stepped in 2024 with The Conversation at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square. The third season opens this week with Ian McEwan discussing The Derangement and climate catastrophe.

St Martin-in-the-Fields is probably the most central venue in London, known worldwide for its amazing music tradition and for its unwavering social justice campaigns. It’s the birthplace of Amnesty, Liberty, the Pride movement and perhaps most of all the homelessness charity work it has championed for decades. That’s our cultural context and our agenda.

I want to know how Armistead Maupin, creator of Anna Madrigal, can humanise the toxic debate about sex and identity; I want to hear what Adam Price, the creator of TV sensation Borgen, can tell us about the independence of Greenland

Yes, we want to sell books. Our partners at Waterstones push a trolley across the east side of Trafalgar Square. Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith and Elif Shafak’s signed longest last year. No surprise there. But in a world that seems crazier by the day, and that I think I understand less and less, The Conversation offers a platform to hear writers illuminate the dark complexities of life. Writers interrogate humane truths. Inconvenient, usually. Difficult, demanding and both radical and deeply familiar. Is it political? Yes. Is it disruptive? Dissenting? Hope so. Woke? Sure, if that’s what you label caring about other people who don’t look, speak and love like you.

I want to know how Armistead Maupin, creator of Anna Madrigal, can humanise the toxic debate about sex and identity; I want to hear what Adam Price, the creator of TV sensation Borgen, can tell us about the independence of Greenland, which was the focus of his award-winning fourth season; I want to hear what the audience make of Carole Cadwalladr’s investigative exposure of Trump’s Broligarchy, and what insights into gender and male violence Hallie Rubenhold draws from Crippen and the Ripper.

Twenty-five years ago I was sitting at lunch with a table of journalists when Gary Younge got a call from the Guardian editor’s office. He listened. Then he hung up and explained that he had to leave to go to Heathrow and get to America urgently as, jumbled and uncertain as the news was, someone had apparently flown a plane into the World Trade Centre. His Orwell Prize-winning writing about America since 9-11 has been my most treasured source of understanding of race, riot and rage in the States. He’s here on 3 February. What does he make of The American Dream as it turns 250?

I want to say everyone is welcome. And that is true. But there’s also something that Ben Okri said here last summer that I think matters. He was talking about environmental campaigning, but it has a wider application for the whole spectrum of democratic and progressive ambition. Yes, debate. Yes, persuade. Yes, convene. But we have to get better at “firing up the base”. So The Conversation also tries to start – well – a conversation.

I love the classic long-form interview format with a public Q&A. We started with a long-table format for Q&A that didn’t quite work, and have evolved now into a more informal style where members of the audience are encouraged to stay on for a drink and hang out together around café tables. It’s like a book club social that explores the interview and Q&A they’ve just attended. It helps that the Crypt at St Martin’s is one of the most intimate and beautifully-lit cabaret spaces in London.

The diversity of the central London audience guarantees you are sitting with people of enriching cultural difference. Jung Chang came to speak last spring about whose voices are heard in China. Afterwards, at one of the tables, an Iraqi student commented: “When there is only silence or loud, loud shouting, you long for quiet voices to ask questions.”

Peter Florence is the director of The Conversation, a series of literary events that run at St Martin-in-the-fields until 27th April. For further information visit The Conversation’s events page.