What was Literary Twitter, a headline asks. The ‘was’ gets your attention. You are reading a story on LitHub about a literary movement that no longer exists, and you have to wonder why it is a thing of the past, but then again, do you?Literary Twitter, like all such movements, sprang and spread on the micro-blogging site, connecting those with an incorrigible love for books and literature – meaning readers, writers, and anyone in between. Literary opinions (as many as lines of 160 characters would allow) flowed from handle to handle, writers and their works got discussed in threads, and the words of authors floated about — consumed, quoted, and interacted with. Most importantly, Literary Twitter also created a web of work opportunities, spreading word on the newest openings and allowing job seekers to connect with employers.Poet Hannan Cohen writes that 90% of her publications were because of the personal connections she made on Twitter. “Because of Twitter, you didn’t even need an MFA or attend in-person conferences or workshops just to rub elbows. You could follow all your favorite literary journals on Twitter and see when there was an open call for submissions or contests,” she writes. Stories going viral could land a book deal if the right publisher or editor saw it, she says.The community thrived and made you trash theories about a generation walking away from literature. If anything, they found newer ways to express their love, bringing hashtags for authors to be easily found, for genres to become a starting point, and for stories to be discovered.Names and phrases became inside jokes. If you were part of that crowd, you’d know the name of Duchess Goldblatt, what the ‘kidney gate’ is, and how Shakespeare’s King Lear was used as a Covid Project.Duchess Goldblatt was the Twitter account of a fictional character created by an anonymous writer, trying to deal with grief and rebuild a life. With her words, the Duchess served up wisdom and jokes, sometimes with the tender touch of a caregiver and sometimes the saltiness of a woman who has seen it all. In 2020, the writer brought out a memoir about it, called Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, that The Washington Post called ‘a respite’ and ‘a summer cocktail of a book’. Tweets by Duchess Goldblatt (Screenshot)Then there was Kidney Gate in 2021, a controversy involving two women – one, a white woman who decides to donate a kidney to a stranger and shares her idea and a letter with a close group of friends, the other a mixed-race woman who was in that group and writes a short story about the incident. The donor is disturbed by the short story, while the writer maintains that you can draw inspiration from real life, and their tussle gives rise to a debate on Twitter about taking stories from life.Story continues below this adFinally, Shakespeare’s King Lear became a prompt for creative works during the outbreak of Covid-19 because of a lore that the bard had written the play at a time he was stuck at home, due to the plague.Pictures of empty chairs, signifying the lack of an audience at literary events, or of torn pages to symbolise the fading interest in the written word, would also do the rounds.There were so many such memorable moments on Literary Twitter that LitHub ran a challenge to find out the most favourite handle or trend. American writer Joyce Carol Oates, known for her witty, political, and very literary presence on Twitter, won the challenge hands down.To give you a taste of her musings, Oates recently commented on US President Donald Trump’s insensitive post about the murder of filmmaker Rob Reiner. She wrote: “how strange is it, how contrary to expectations, that our most literate presidents lived in the 18th century; our most recently elected 21st century president is barely literate, with the vocabulary of a three-year-old & the atrophied prefrontal cortex of a nasty person who has outlived his time (sic).” Sharing her post, a user wished there could be a Pulitzer Prize for Twitter prose.how strange is it, how contrary to expectations, that our most literate presidents lived in the 18th century; our most recently elected 21st century president is barely literate, with the vocabulary of a three-year-old & the atrophied prefrontal cortex of a nasty person who has… https://t.co/R5XfIT7IY3— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) December 15, 2025Joyce was also among the first voices of support for Gaza. She tweeted in November 2023, “Revulsion for the ravaging of Gaza & dismay for terrible leadership of Israel can be equally felt. many (of us). feel great sympathy for civilians trapped in this nightmare whoever they are & especially children (sic)”Story continues below this adA strong contender to Joyce for the LitHub challenge was a short story called Cat Person, written by Kristen Roupenian. A disquieting tale that captured the muckiness of modern dating, the short story, published by The New Yorker, was viral all over Twitter and other platforms. It resonated at a time when the #MeToo movement was huge on social media.Joyce wasn’t the only writer clued in on Literary Twitter. American poet Patricia Smith would tweet about something as mundane as taking a break from Twitter, but in such words: “I’m not poeting the poems I should be poeting or noveling the novel I should be noveling. Y’all are entertaining & talented AF, but there’s no drug like the page.”Also read | Desire, dissent, and the female gaze: Why women write so much fanfictionAmong Indian authors, Meena Kandaswamy is a regular presence, literary in her short takes, but with words that cut through like a sword in the wind. Her pinned tweet about her newest work reads: “I look at my novels as my journey in life — they’re the landscape against which other things happen (men, love, children, jobs, heartbreak).. Somewhere while this novel was being written (2020-25), my life went on. soon it’s going to be out in the world.”But the movement began to fade, according to those who were actively involved in Literary Twitter, more so after 2022. Twitter’s takeover by American billionaire Elon Musk, after which it became known as X, had its reverberations on Literary Twitter. Algorithms were hit, and what you saw or read drastically shifted to paid content or imposed threads. Communities could not keep up, and writers began to leave Twitter and migrate to Instagram. Hannan Cohen writes that the effort of scrolling through it was not worth it to see a new poem from a friend. It has, she says, “destroyed a central hub of communication that so many creative people relied on not only for work, but for social connections.”Story continues below this adThis is a homage — ode, if you will — to the literary movement that once was. But once you are bitten by the bug of literature, it is not easy to throw you off. May writers, readers, and everyone in between keep finding ways to rebuild the network.Cris is a Kerala-based features writer