Olga Tokarczuk told an audience at Impact in Poznań that the world no longer deserves large, demanding novels because its pace has become destructive. She said reading a big book has turned into a difficult challenge for many people and added that modern readers increasingly want stories that are extremely simple and one-dimensional.
The Polish Nobel laureate said she often learns how "Księgi Jakubowe" ends from readers’ summaries, a sign of how a 2018 novel she spent seven years writing now travels through conversation as much as through the page. Tokarczuk used that book as her main example of the labor behind a major work, saying some subjects cannot be told briefly and that if the hours spent on it were calculated honestly, her hourly wage would amount to a miner’s pension.
Her remarks landed as part of a broader discussion about the state of reading and the economics of literary publishing, but they also pointed to a deeper shift in the way public life now pulls at readers. Tokarczuk said media, aggressive politics and nonstop social demands force people to take sides quickly, and that society should allow itself the luxury of being intellectually transparent instead of treating every issue as a test of loyalty.
That tension is built into the way her own work is received. Tokarczuk said she does not need to declare a position in every conflict or have an opinion on every small decision by officials, a view that cuts against the speed and certainty modern culture rewards. She argued that literature still has a place for length, difficulty and ambiguity, even as more readers drift toward fast, compressed narratives that leave little room for patience.
She also suggested that the future of that kind of writing may be limited. "Wielu w to nie wierzy, ale myślę, że to już moja ostatnia powieść," she said, saying many people do not believe it but that she thinks her newest novel will be her last. For a writer whose most ambitious book took seven years to complete, the comment sounded less like a flourish than a final judgment on what the current age is prepared to read.
