Here’s a question for you: should people in the audience at writers festivals be allowed to ask questions at the end of sessions? The Melbourne Writers Festival thinks not. This year, they will not allocate any time for live Q&A in their events.

Are they trying to avoid heated challenges on controversial topics? It appears not. The organisers say their decision will allow the writers more time to speak, expand and discuss, with each other or with the chair. And they point out that questions can be submitted in advance or in writing on the day and may be chosen to be asked by the moderator. But some festivalgoers are breathing a sigh of relief for different reasons.

These people are fed up with irrelevant, intrusive, hostile or just plain silly questions. They have zero tolerance for nervous wafflers, gushing fans, nitpicking critics, wannabe authors asking for advice or worst of all, passionate ranters who see the microphone as an excuse to earbash us all with their obsessions.

I know what they mean. In the many years I’ve attended literary events, sometimes as a speaker or a chair and often as an audience member, I’ve encountered all these annoying people. And there’s another category: the author who inadvertently hogs question time.

Once I chaired a session of three international novelists, plus a very famous and highly controversial evolutionary biologist. When I saw a long queue of eager young men lining up behind the microphone, I had to ask whether anybody wanted to direct a question to somebody who was not Richard Dawkins.

But during these many years, I’ve noticed something else. By and large, audience questions have got better. Readers are canny, respectful but not fawning, and they’ve done their homework. Occasionally, you get a question that shows how a book has changed someone’s life, or a question that pinpoints a vital issue that the people onstage have been nervously skirting around. These are exciting moments that work precisely because they are unscripted, and the authors’ replies can be equally spontaneous and honest.

So I think it’s a big mistake to ban Q&A sessions from author interviews or panel discussions. For me, they are an essential part of the democratic appeal of a writers’ festival. Readers relish their brief chance to connect with writers, and in return, most writers also enjoy the chance to connect with readers.

Of course, there can be exceptions. Salman Rushdie once appeared at a function in Melbourne that allowed neither questions nor book signings, and given that he was a marked man at risk of assassination, that seemed a sensible move. And if, say, the writer of a memoir about surviving family trauma wishes to avoid Q&A, that wish should be honoured.