This year’s Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) provoked the usual conversations about the usual topics: Are literature festivals necessary in a country beset by poverty and illiteracy? Why aren’t more books being published in English, and why aren’t more people writing in Urdu? Does Pakistani literature have relevance in the world? Can art and literature solve our country’s problems? And so on and so forth. Authors and intellectuals sit on the stage and risk public ridicule in an attempt to provide answers to these imponderables, but they are forgotten between one year and the next.

In the eight years since the inception of the KLF — and with the subsequent Lahore Literary Festival (LLF), Islamabad Literature Festival (ILF), Children’s Literature Festivals (CLF), festivals all over Pakistan, and now the New York edition of the LLF and London edition of the KLF on the horizon — we haven’t yet resolved these weighty issues. We continue to debate them with gusto among the gentle sea breezes, sweeping palm trees and calm waters of the Chinna Creek. Perhaps we take a singular pleasure in meeting year after year to debate the unsolvable, the way you participate in family gupshup about that annoying neighbour who won’t stop parking his car in front of your driveway.

Another point of contention that crops up every year at the KLF is the problem of panel moderation (or chairing, as it’s called in Britain). The most frequent complaint I’ve encountered in every round-up column and blog post is that the moderator for so-and-so’s panel ruined everything. Either she hadn’t read the book or had never heard of the writer (admitted by a moderator, in public, at the KLF two years ago), or the moderator decided to expound on her own work instead of focusing on the guest speaker (reported to have happened at the LLF this year in a panel between two major global writers). Or, the moderator hadn’t prepared a good line of questions for the writer, making the experience weird and unfocused for the audience.

Having attended the KLF seven years in a row, I believe that the choice of moderator is as crucial as the choice of guest. In fact, when I’m invited to be a guest speaker on a panel, I relax, because I know that all I have to do is show up and answer the questions. It’s almost like a picnic for me. On the other hand, when I’m required to chair a panel or moderate a conversation, I quake because it means I’ve got a tremendous amount of work ahead of me before I set foot on the stage. My friends and family will tell you I spend the entire month before the festival in a bad mood because I’m so stressed out about the preparations for one single panel.

“The most frequent complaint is that the moderator ruined everything. Either she hadn’t read the book or had never heard of the writer, or decided to expound on her own work instead of focusing on the guest speaker.

I’ll let you in on a secret: moderators don’t get paid for their work at the festival, although they should, because the festival programmers would then take more care with the selection of moderators and the quality of panels would improve as a result. But it’s not money that motivates a good moderator any more than it is the appearance fee that motivates a good writer — or at least, it shouldn’t be. It is a sense of professionalism and respect for the written word, as well as consideration for the audience and the guest who are giving up their time to attend the panel. I feel a particular responsibility to the writer I’m speaking to, as well as to the audience, to prepare in the best way possible.

This KLF I was requested to conduct a conversation with German writer Ilija Trojanow, who came to Karachi courtesy of the Goethe-Institut to speak about his bestseller, The Collector of Worlds, a grand novel about three time periods in the life of the traveller and writer Sir Richard Burton. I looked up Trojanow on the internet and read about his life and work, and then I got in touch with him to introduce myself. How thrilled I was when Trojanow offered to send me a copy of the novel in exchange for a copy of my own novel about Sindh! These are the exchanges that begin to forge a personal bond between moderator and guest, that make an intimate conversation possible in a public venue in front of an audience.

While I was waiting for the book to arrive, I researched Trojanow some more. I read articles about him and interviews with him. I watched online videos in order to familiarise myself with his speaking style. I read reviews of the novel so that I could pick up on the important threads and questions that the book raised, as well as its flaws and strengths. The book arrived in the post two weeks after our initial correspondence and I set about reading it from cover to cover, but I was already familiar with the material thanks to my initial research.

Formulating questions for the panel then became an easier task, supplemented by my own thinking and knowledge of the subject of Sindh during the time of the British Raj. A quick meeting with Trojanow before the panel — because during a festival, time is always short and you can’t control for every factor during the session — helped me to focus my questions and ensure he was comfortable with the topics I wanted to bring up.

By the time you reach the stage, most of your work needs to have already been done, so that the conversation can feel natural and organic. A moderator has to bring his or her own expertise to the panel, but she must be careful never to overshadow the speaker or try to impress the audience with her own knowledge. They aren’t there to hear you, but to hear your guest. Your job is to point the conversation in the right direction, make sure it flows, and make sure that the audience feels involved and invited long before the questions even start.

In the end, the conversation with Trojanow went beautifully. I was lucky to have as a guest a brilliant man, a practiced speaker, someone who isn’t afraid to expound on any subject without fear of reaction or disapproval. A moderator longs for a guest like that; to have been any less prepared than I had been would have wasted a great opportunity for the audience to benefit from his presence. You could almost say I’m looking forward to the next time I get to moderate at a panel like this.

The columnist is the author of six books and also writes for The New York Times. She is based in Karachi

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 26th, 2017