In Sweden, numerous public conversations on literature featuring authors from abroad are held each year. Some of those are interpreted for the audience. Interpreting strategies evolve to cope with the formal constraints, as well as the amplification of a staged conversation, which is generated by the contextual setting and culture-interview communicative activity type that is characterised by narrative turns-in-talk. By combining the concepts of topical episode coherence and (re)production format, the analysis in the present paper demonstrates how alternating bilingual updating coincides with narrative development in an interpreter-mediated dialogue, as well as how the interpreter uses variously designed communicative resources to support the moderator and the writer in co-creating the speech event.