‘Funny, sexy and a bit weird': inside the new wave of literary parties

The Guardian

22-04-2025

On a Saturday evening in London's Notting Hill, a large crowd of moderately tipsy young people are spilling into a tailor's shop on Portobello Road. A passerby could easily assume they were walking past a fashion pop-up attracting a stylish herd of fanatics. But they'd be wrong. The buzzing crowd is here for a live reading event, and they're eager with energy and anticipation.
Soho Reading Series began in the summer of 2023 and was founded by Tom Willis, a writer and PhD student. He wanted to make a 'scene where anyone could turn up, party, and have a killer time with literature as the centre,' he tells me over an extra-dry martini a couple of hours before one of the events.
Live literature readings are, of course, nothing new. Salons, bookshop readings, poetry slams and open mics have been fixtures of literary cultures for decades. However, lately this tradition has been revitalised, with events like the Soho Reading Series cropping up all over the country.
Willis was inspired by the cultural heyday of Soho in the 80s and 90s, an era when writers and literary types coalesced in the boozy backrooms of private members' clubs. Unlike its name, the Soho Reading Series migrates with each event to different venues across the city – from a Grade II-listed pub in Harringay to a Victorian Anglican church on Ladbroke Grove.
'If you're a published writer, you might go to your publishing house's Christmas party, and everyone just knows each other there. That's the professional literary scene, and then we're the unprofessional literary scene.' Willis says with a smile.
'Scene' is a word used by many of the event's attendees – but only ever while miming air quotes. I guess this is because the word implies an air of pretentiousness and exclusivity. In reality, these events are unassuming and attract a diverse and expanding crowd. There's no immovable barrier, secret password or even a ticket to enter – anyone can walk in.
'It's a party of like-minded people who care about literature. So that's why it's such a good party, because everyone cares about the same thing, and everyone's not there for their career. They hang out with people who like books and have something nice to share,' says Willis.
Soho Reading Series is just one vein in a growing web of live reading events. The audience is young compared with the average literature festival crowd and it attracts a devout congregation of both literary and party-curious individuals.
'Some people come for a party. Some people come for readings. People often end up staying for the thing that they hadn't planned to come for,' says Sophie Barshall, editor of London-based quarterly DIY arts and culture newspaper The Toe Rag, which also hosts popular live readings.
Inside the tailor's shop on Portobello Road, the readings begin an hour late. There is no microphone; each reader flicks through printed sheets of paper or scrolls through the notes app on their phone, attempting to project their voice over shuffling, mumbles, momentary laughter and heckling. The shop – usually populated by people shopping for cashmere socks – is full to capacity. The audience has leaked out on to the pavement, and a young woman next to me is FaceTiming a friend outside so they can hear what's going on.
What is being read aloud is unrestricted by theme or genre. The readings jump from excerpts of short stories published in Granta magazine to a five-star Google review of the 2007 Pixar film Ratatouille.
Most of the people I speak to have'never been to something like this before but came across the event through social media or a writer's Substack and decided to give it a try. Avid readers and amateur writers make up around half of those in attendance, but a significant portion of people tell me they are there purely because they like the idea of being considered literary.
As the reading ends and we move from one local pub to the next, a young man drunkenly confesses that 'he doesn't even enjoy the readings that much' – he just comes to 'meet the types of people who would enjoy it'.
'It's probably not for everyone,' Willis says. 'It's boring unless you're really engaged in it. It's free and open to everyone, but it does self-select. But that's the scene – that's why literature is so good for scene making.'
In Glasgow, a number of reading series such as thi wurd and Shrill have emerged in recent years. Waterwings Press, which has been hosting live reading events in the city's south side since 2020, was set up by Leo Bussi, who moved to Glasgow wanting to discover its art scene and meet different people. 'I thought the best way to do that is to message someone on Instagram and say, 'Hey, do you want to read for my reading?'' he says.
Each Waterwings event is made up of readings by five writers: some are seasoned performers, others are first-time readers. Contemporary poetry is the most represented genre alongside what Bussi loosely defines as 'art writing' – a mixture of autofiction, art and literary criticism.
'It's like taking a piece of spaghetti and throwing it against the wall to see if it'll stick,' he says. 'There's an improvisation to the evening, which can be incredibly stressful but also gratifying because when it works, it really works.'
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Though there are plenty of people with formal writing qualifications at these events, and I spot a number of attendees sporting the go-to literary status symbol, a Daunt Books tote bag, this new approach to live readings feels separate from the world of mainstream publishing. If anything, these are spaces specifically curated to rail against it.
In trade magazine the Bookseller's 2025 survey of publishing salaries, 73% of respondents said they were middle class and 86% that they were white. Because so many publishing staff members 'come from the same background', they 'picture the reader as someone like them and people they know,' says Rachel Connolly, a writer and regular on the London live reading circuit.
Connolly co-hosts a series called New Work alongside her friend and writer, Isis O'Regan, a dedicated space for fiction writers to litmus-test new, unpublished work with an audience. The series debuted last July; previous readers include authors Eliza Clark, Gabriel Smith and Nicole Flattery.
'Our ideal reader is really good at writing, funny, sexy and a bit weird, a bit out there. In the digital age, writers probably know each other online from Twitter and Instagram, but it's way nicer to come and meet people and listen to their work, hear their voice and actually put a body to the impression that you have of someone,' Connolly says.
'But maybe people are also trying to get laid,' she adds, half jokingly.
This seems to be a common theme – Willis often begins a Soho Reading Series event by jokily suggesting that audience members get with someone they find attractive – and is another reason that attending them feels more like going to a music gig than a literature fixture.
'It's meant to be enjoyable,' says poet and musician James Massiah, whose east London reading series Adult Entertainment is all about 'party poetry'. His nights typically begin with audiences sitting on the floor listening to performances by poets and rappers, before a DJ takes to the decks and the dancing begins.
'What do people like at parties? They like dancing, they like meeting someone they fancy, they like hearing some tunes and they like getting it on,' he says. 'I want the writing to reflect that, and I want the mood to reflect that as well.'
'Any live literature event is about bringing work into the world and sharing it with others,' agrees Joey Frances, a poet and organiser of the long-running reading series Peter Barlow's Cig based in Manchester, named after the chainsmoking character from Coronation Street.
'You're hearing one another, you're feeding back from one another, you're hanging out, you're having fun.'
Fun is the key to the success of these events, Massiah thinks. 'It's not a lecture. It's like the spirit of dance or dub sound systems where people congregate for the music. It's like that, but people are congregating for the words.'