Readers

Abstract

In this chapter, Zahid Hussain, perhaps best known as the author of The Curry Mile, takes us on various journeys through the north of England, and to Pakistan, where he engages with a wide variety of people—schoolchildren, self-important academics, clueless audience members. The chapter explores how twenty-first-century authors interact with their audience in a wide variety of manners, only some of which are centred on the texts that brought them together in the first place. Hussain inverts the way we ordinarily think about the author–reader relationship. Readers may construct images of authors in order to fulfil personal or communal needs—the desire to be represented in the global literary sphere, for example. But, as Hussain shows through his multilayered autofictional chapter, in which successive encounters with ‘readers’ give rise to ever-new stories, authors just as vitally depend upon imagined constructions of their audience to sustain their creativity.