Talking Books with Tom Willis

When Tom Willis announced the launch of a literary talk show — which is fittingly and eponymously titled Tom Willis – he described it as “fun and cool.” The literary talk show might not be a genre often associated with being either fun or cool, but Tom has done more than most to reenergise the literary world in London recently. The launch of his talk show follows on from the Soho Reading Series, an itinerant event that pops up across London and sits somewhere between a party and a live reading, which Tom founded in 2023.

The idea for the Soho Reading Series came while Tom was studying at Yale and regularly making the journey from New Haven to New York. There, he found a thriving scene of book launches and readings happening across Manhattan, with a crowd of famous writers and bright young things. “Everyone was getting drunk, you could smoke inside, the parties were written up in the New York Times,” he says. “It was just so glamorous and American.”

“Everyone was getting drunk, you could smoke inside, the parties were written up in the New York Times. It was just so glamorous and American. I just wanted to have that here, and it didn’t exist here so I started putting on these nights.”

Returning to London, Tom was excited to do something similar and inject the staid literary world of “events that end at eight, where the wine is warm” with some new energy. “I just wanted to have that here, and it didn’t exist here so I started putting on these nights,” he says. For Tom, the party element is about “adding glamour to something that already has so much depth and passion.” It’s also helped to bring a new crowd into literature. “There are people who come for the party, and people who come for the readings,” Tom says. “People are hopefully enthused to write a bit more, read a bit more, show up to the next one.”

Since Tom founded the Soho Reading Series, the night’s profile has grown and grown. Profiles in major newspapers have referred to Tom as “the man making books sexy again” and more and more writers have wanted to take part. Over the last year, that’s included writers such as Christian Lorentzen, Zadie Smith and Geoff Dyer. “Well, they’ve got more famous,” Tom says of recent readers, but with every line up, he tries to strike a balance. Big names might top the bill, but people just starting out will be given a chance to read alongside these literary icons. “I really want to make the writers feel like rockstars for the night, but I don’t know if they do or what that means exactly,” he says.

Over the last three years, Tom has helped to invigorate London’s literary world. “There’s a really healthy milieu, and it’s not just because of the reading series,” Tom says. “There are really great magazines that began at the same time as Soho Reading Series. There was just a moment in 2023 in London where a bunch of stuff started, and we’re all friends and now people coalesce around it. It’s democratic, you get a top book editor and a 22-year-old aspiring writer all at the same big party.” Perhaps predictably, this has led to new connections and conversations, as editors and agents tap into the new literary scene. “People have said it’s led to nice things for them, but that was never the aim,” Tom adds. “I just want to get people’s eyes on books.”

This is the same ambition that Tom has with his new talk show, which has so far featured interviews with Jago Rackham and Madeline Cash. Across the ten episodes of the first series, the plan is to introduce people to some of Tom’s favourite contemporary writers, and to give a glimpse into their backstory, inspirations and ideas. “People really care about the personality of the writer,” Tom says. “Sometimes when you read a book you want to know what the person’s like, so you’ll be able to see them chatting. It’s not replacing literature, it’s just to add more to the world of literature.” 

“I really want to make the writers feel like rockstars for the night, but I don’t know if they do or what that means exactly.”

TV shows like this used to exist, and used to be a part of regular broadcasting. They’ve already finished filming their second series, and have plans for the third. Tom mentions a number of references, including Melvyn Bragg’s The South Bank Show, which ran for more than 30 years before finishing in 2010, as well as William Frank Buckley Jr.’s 1990s tenure on Firing Line and programs such as After Dark on Channel 4 and Read All About It on the BBC. Both Tom and the show’s producer, author Bruce Omar Yates, single out Charlie Rose’s namesake talk show as a particular influence.

For Tom, these shows represent an intellectual engagement with literature that has been lost from popular culture. “Everything now is just a race to gloop, to childish profanity. Every celebrity interview now is garbage,” he says. “What we’re doing is saying look at this literature, isn’t it fun, look at this literary criticism, isn’t it fun.”

“Everything now is just a race to gloop, to childish profanity. Every celebrity interview now is garbage. What we’re doing is saying look at this literature, isn’t it fun, look at this literary criticism, isn’t it fun.”

The idea of keeping it fun runs across the talk show and the reading series. Tom cares about the ideas, the writers and the books he’s talking about, but he’s also adamant that his work isn’t the kind of “achingly earnest” literary content you see on BookTok. “What we’re hoping to do with this is offer a model of culture that takes it seriously but with a contemporary irreverence,” he says. “To keep in step with the times but also to capture the seriousness with which this needs to be addressed, just not with an earnestness which is gauche or off putting.” The result, he hopes, is something that is “attractive, fun, interesting, sexy.”

So much of Tom’s love for classic literary talk shows comes from consuming them years later, unearthing a treasure trove of interviews and conversations that happened before he was born. As he discovered books, he could go back and watch an interview with the person who’d written it. In one sense, this is what he hopes his own show will create. “I’d like it to create a positive archive for writers and writing,” he says, “so when people get big you can go back and visit them.”

The show is different from his reading series – there’s no party, for a start – but it all comes back to Tom’s love of writing, reading and learning more about books. “The only things I really like are life and literature,” he adds. “So I’d like the opportunity to read a load of books for free.”