Earth Is Flat and Men Don't Read Fiction
This week I was in Norway for the publication of There Are Rivers in the Sky. In the land of Henrik Ibsen who once wisely said “the worst that a man can do to himself is to do injustice to others.”
Allow me to take you to a most beautiful place in Oslo.
Let’s walk through the doors of a great library—Deichman Bjørvika. The architecture and interior design are both remarkable, reflecting the library’s role as a welcoming and free public space. In the evening the building glows, and during the day, even when the sky is overcast, shafts of light fall through the open windows.
Like a book within a book, this library holds a secret library inside.
Come with me upstairs to the top floor where we will find The Silent Room of “unreadable books.” An archive of unseen and untouched texts.
This is the Future Library—a project started by the fabulous artist Katie Paterson.
Each year, a writer from around the world is chosen and invited to create a manuscript for the future. This piece of literature will remain unseen by anyone other than its author, sealed in a glass case, to be opened a century from now.
100 years later….
Here is a full list of those of us who have contributed so far:
Margaret Atwood (2015), David Mitchell (2016), Sjón (2017), Elif Shafak (2018), Han Kang (2019), Karl Ove Knausgard (2020), Ocean Vuong (2021), Tsitsi Dangarembga (2022), Judith Schalansky (2023), Valeria Luiselli (2024), Tommy Orange (submitted in 2025).
Inside the ‘Silent Room’' there are 100 layers of undulating, smooth wood that have been sourced from trees planted in a forest that grows alongside the library. This room is open to everyone. You may sit and reflect there, but the glass drawers, exuding a soft amber light, remain firmly closed.
It is undeniably a cultural, literary and intellectual space. Yet, I would say, there is something more to it, something almost spiritual.
Because it is a place that invites you to ask yourself:
What will remain of today’s literature and art and creativity?
Will the stories we write, read and tell ourselves still be remembered by future generations? Will they even mean anything to them?
Why should they even care about our stories and silences?
After the visit to the Future Library, I had a heartwarming event and a book signing at the iconic Litteraturhaus with a very diverse and loving audience. And it was during this beautiful evening of storytelling that I felt motivated to revisit the questions I had asked earlier.
And that is because, in my new novel, the Epic of Gilgamesh plays an important role—this is the oldest piece of literature known in human history. It dates back to the Old Babylonian Period, but as it was passed down by word of mouth for centuries, preserved through oral tradition long before scribes wrote it down, it means that it is even older than we assume.
I could not help but wonder: Ever since the Epic of Gilgamesh was written down, countless empires have risen and fallen, the most formidable rulers have perished, and even the tallest buildings have crumbled, yet a poem composed of mere letters has survived the tides of history and here we are still talking about it, still reading it.
How interesting that an epic has proved stronger than the most fearsome and ruthless King Ashurbanipal who owned everything and everyone at the time.
How inspiring that a poem made of words and made of breath can be more enduring than the mightiest empires and greediest rulers.
Fiction has an incredible transformative power. Just because it is quiet and gentle and mostly invisible to the eye does not mean it is not there, this inner strength.
Fiction changes us from within. I know this because it happened to me.
Novels connected me with other worlds, other possibilities, outside my own small self when I was a child in a very patriarchal, inward-looking and conservative neighbourhood in Ankara, raised by a single working mother. It was fiction that encouraged me to go beyond that confined box.
‘You say that, but men do not read fiction,’ some people object. ‘So it is only women who experience that.’
This statement surfaces time and again in many conversations about literature. I have heard it so many times. But is it true? Or is it just an old platitude that should be questioned, examined, and perhaps long discarded?
Like many clichés, this one, too, once harboured a kernel of truth. But over time, it became an empty refrain, devoid of nuance and accuracy.
The truth is, there are no universal polls or up-to-date studies on the number of male readers, just like there are no statistics on female readers. Yes, there are a few surveys here and there, but these are limited, and not representative of a country, let alone the world population. So, the claim that ‘men do not read fiction’ mostly comes from limited and lazy repetitions— not a proper head count.
My observation, which is just as subjective as the next person’s, bring me to a wholly different conclusion.
During numerous cultural festivals, literary events, book fairs, public talks, and my own travels across continents, I have noticed something intriguing unfolding in various cultures and age groups—a shift that, for the most part, has gone unnoticed but is nevertheless taking place. For quite some time now, I have been observing that more and more men are reading fiction.
Because we have entered a new era, and the codes and patterns of the previous one no longer apply. Because here is a universal truth, regardless of gender, race, or class:
The faster our world moves and the more dizzying the news becomes, the more we are bombarded by snippets of information and angry soundbites every single day; the deeper our confusion or emotional fatigue or anxiety or sense of loneliness grow in the face of the coldness and divisiveness of today’s politics and the behaviour of some of our politicians, the greater will become our need for literature to remind us of what comes and goes, rises and falls, and what really and truly endures.
As always, a moving article. I’m a man, an old man now, nearly 76 years of life behind me, and certainly only a few ahead. I’ve been a reader all of my life. I grew up with the Hardy Boys and with Zane Grey. Except for what I was required to read in my pursuit of a PHd it has always been novels, no one ever told me that as a man I shouldn’t read novels. Is that because I grew up in an essentially female household, my father having passed when I was only 11 years old? If so, that is yet another gift that my wonderful mother gave me, “Thanks mom, I owe you even more than I realized.”
And thank you for all of your wonderful stories that have brought so much pleasure into my life in the past couple of years. Keep writing, I need your words’ we need your words.
As a boy, I began reading fiction and never stopped. Along the way, fiction guided me to poetry and other languages, but unfortunately, I'm only literate in two and have to settle with translations. Thank you, Elif, for mentioning The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is long overdue for a read as an old man.