Buell said the chance to bring Smith—whose books White Teeth and Autograph Man have been critically-acclaimed bestsellers—to the department as a visiting lecturer came only because she was a Radcliffe Fellow last year.

“I’m not sure that it will recur because I’m not sure that she’ll feel that she needs or wants to teach as part of her career future,” he said.

“When you have an opportunity like that involving a meteorically rising talent, if you have an ounce of gumption you want to jump at the opportunity,” Buell added.

The event was advertised in e-mails to English concentrators and creative writing students. Previous readings have been publicized as restricted to concentrators and creative writing students only, but enforcement has been lax.

Tickets were originally required for the Hornby reading, but the policy was reversed yesterday in an e-mail from the department’s Coordinator of Undergraduate Studies Mary C. Johnson announcing that “we are opening Nick Hornby’s reading to everyone.”

“As far as the limitations are concerned, we wanted to give some advantages to English concentrators, given that the courses [Smith] is teaching are limited in enrollment, and we have increasing numbers of students for whom writing is a strong interest,” Buell said. “As an English department who’s her host, we should support our students.”

The English department has been struggling to satisfy demand for its popular creative writing courses, and Buell said Smith was “the key differential factor” in accommodating that demand this year.

“By design we are better off in our ability to supply workshops than we were several years ago, but we aren’t yet at the utopian state where supply and demand are in balance,” Buell said.

—Staff Writer Benjamin A. Black can be reached at bblack@fas.harvard.edu.