The Writer As Image

Why does literary culture suddenly seem so interested in hotness? Recent discourse around the hot literati has sparked debates about who qualifies, whether the category is meaningful at all, and why literary culture suddenly seems so invested in attractiveness. But beneath the discourse sits a broader question: are writers increasingly expected to also be influencers? Have they always been?

The writer’s appearance is not exactly irrelevant to their popularity. Byron’s good looks have endured for two centuries, with fan edits of his portraits still circulating on TikTok. Joan Didion’s image – cigarette, sunglasses, dress – has become almost as recognisable as her syntax. A quick Google search for “hottest authors” reveals lists ranking writers by attractiveness, including Ernest Hemingway, Jhumpa Lahiri, Elif Şafak, Albert Camus and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 

Yet the mainstream attitude toward writers has generally been that they are, or should be, above looks. That belief feels less relevant in an influencer-driven internet where writers are increasingly expected to document and brand themselves online in addition to writing. This pressure is felt across creative fields, and even has a name: influencer creep, coined by Sophie Bishop. According to Bishop, the job of influencer is built on “learning how to constantly accommodate oneself to the means of establishing and maintaining visibility”. One of those ways is to be hot.

Social media platforms and their algorithms have been instrumental in creating contemporary standards around hotness. Looksmaxxing is the most recent and extreme example of this. Elsewhere, Instagram face – the cyborgian mask of professionally beautiful porelessness and ethnic ambiguity – left a lasting mark on women’s beauty ideals because social media algorithms consistently reward attractive faces with visibility. This has been especially true in highly visual industries like beauty and fashion.

What feels newer, and slightly awkward, is that people in literary and intellectual fields are now also publicly valorised for their hotness. Writers – along with publishers and agencies – increasingly participate in this economy too, posting face and working hotness into literary presence in order to stay culturally relevant.

So has algorithmic face culture finally come for the belles-lettres? Are expectations around what writers should be like changing in the face of algorithmic media?

Algorithmic face culture is the way digital platforms have made the face the primary currency of visibility (especially for women). The term builds on what Ted Striphas called “algorithmic culture” in 2015: humans increasingly delegating the sorting of culture – people, ideas, objects – to computational systems. The triumph of algorithmic recommendation, coupled with what we know about how social media platforms privilege certain faces, has made writers’ appearances matter more for visibility, sales and reach than they once did.