The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recently awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in literature to Hungarian novelist and screenwriter Laszlo Krasznahorkai “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
One can’t help but wonder: could anything similar happen in Pakistan? Can we imagine a Pakistani novelist or poet whose words transcend boundaries and reshape the global literary landscape?
After all, these fertile lands have produced remarkable literary legacies — from the third-century BCE Sanskrit animal fables of the Panchatantra to the progressive voices of the Progressive Writers’ Association and beyond. Yet today, Pakistan’s literary scene exposes a growing vacuum: glossy on the surface but lacking the cultural depth and societal urgency that once defined great writing. Today, literary culture is often apolitical and upscale — festivals, launches and publishing houses serving as elite social gatherings dominated by urban, Anglophone writers — while marginalised voices and newcomers, remain unseen and unheard.
The problem, however, runs much deeper than the exclusivity of literary spaces. It begins with a dearth of reading itself, a phenomenon not limited to Pakistan, but one that has become global. The ‘reading revolution’ of the 18th century once transformed human civilisation. Literacy spread from palaces to farms, from aristocrats to peasants. Reading became an obsession, a democratic act. Historians described it as a ‘fever’, a ‘madness’, that changed the world peacefully but profoundly.
Where readers once read ‘intensively’, revisiting a few cherished books, the reading revolution ushered in ‘extensive’ reading, people devoured newspapers, journals, and works of history, philosophy, science, theology, and literature. In Britain, new titles grew from about 100 per year in 1750 to 600 by 1825 and to 6,000 before the end of the century. It was an age when the written word became the great equalizer, a bridge between power and the people.
But that fever has long subsided. Today’s digital world, dominated by short-form video and algorithmic feeds, privileges emotion over reason. The culture of reading — slow, deliberate, and reflective — is being replaced by a culture of reaction. Attention spans have shortened; curiosity has waned. The Atlantic reported that even Ivy League freshmen now struggle to finish entire books, something unthinkable just a decade ago. Reading comprehension, once a hallmark of intellectual rigour, is collapsing even in the world’s best universities.
Pakistan mirrors this decline in far starker terms. According to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, the number of newspapers and periodicals fell from 749 in 2011 to 707 in 2019. In Punjab, the number of dailies dropped from 102 to just 42; in Sindh, from 44 to five. The average daily circulation of newspapers fell from 9.9 million in 2007 to just 6.1 million the following year. Plus, a Gallup & Gilani survey conducted in 2019, and one can easily gauge that today’s situation is even worse, revealed that three in four Pakistanis (75 per cent) do not read books at all. Only 9.0 per cent described themselves as regular readers. The rest, it seems, have abandoned the written word altogether.
Even those who still ‘read’ are often consuming AI-generated text — social media captions, blog posts and essays crafted by machines — ultimately eroding the taste for the classics. The consequences are subtle but profound. Students internalize the repetitive phrasing and standardized rhythm of AI-written prose. By extension, their thinking becomes mechanical, predictable and shallow. Without exposure to great literature, language decays into mimicry, and thought loses its originality.
If reading is dying, writing is suffocating. Pakistan’s writers operate in an environment devoid of infrastructure, visibility and support. Literary magazines are few, publishers’ risk-averse and readerships nearly nonexistent. Talented young poets and storytellers often share their work on social media, where it floats briefly through the algorithmic void before disappearing. Very few make the leap from Instagram posts to full-length books. And when they do, the odds remain stacked against them.
New published books in Pakistan are prohibitively expensive. With a minimum wage of Rs37,000 and over 40 per cent of workers earning less, a Rs3,000-Rs5000 book becomes a luxury item, not a cognitive and cultural necessity. Public libraries are virtually non-existent; if they do exist, they are in ruins, and school libraries are either empty or locked. Piracy thrives: you can easily find bootleg copies of renowned authors in everyday bazaars like Chaka Gali, Peshawar. The problem, therefore, isn’t just economic, it’s existential. Pakistani writers are under-read, under-promoted, and under-valued, even within their own country.
Notwithstanding that, off the top of my head and in a non-exhaustive way, Pakistan does have brilliant contemporary voices that deserve to be acknowledged: Mohammed Hanif, Tariq Ali, Anjum Altaf, Awais Khan, Taha Kehar, and poets like Afshan Shafi, Fatima Ijaz and Mahnoor Rehan and nowadays, even full-fledged professionals-turned-writers like Zafar Masud, Dr Naveed Iftikhar and Shueyb Gandapur. These are not merely names but testaments to what Pakistani literature could be if only it were nurtured, read and celebrated. Writers, after all, are what Hegel once called ‘world-historical individuals’ — those who embody and reshape the spirit of their time.
But without the support of many — government, civil society, publishers, and writers themselves — can Pakistani writers truly diffuse the plaguing throes of low readership and, consequently, meager income; the lack of mentorship and literary infrastructure; and the exclusivity of literary circles that keep emerging voices at bay? I doubt it.
We need inclusivity. Writers who thrive regardless of language, wealth, connections or marginalisation, and readers who cherish their work. If prices cannot be deflated, the state must at least ensure libraries in every district and a curriculum that goes beyond rote learning — one that builds gradually the muscles not just for reading, but for savouring what we read. After all, we cannot force anyone to read Plato, Shakespeare, Byron, Hafiz or Iqbal; it would be like offering coffee to a monkey whose taste buds have not yet awakened to its flavour.
Our literary spaces remain largely elite-driven and corporate-funded. Festivals are valuable celebrations of culture, but they cannot substitute for a sustained reading culture. True literature grows not under chandeliers or logos, but in the collective consciousness of a society that reads, questions, and feels. It must break free from institutions and return to the people — not as performance, but as lived experience.
The world today (and Pakistan specifically) increasingly resembles a ‘post-literate society’, one disturbingly similar to the pre-literate Middle Ages. In such a world, the role of literature becomes even more critical. To write and to read are radical acts, small rebellions against intellectual decay. Pakistan does not lack talent; it lacks the ecosystem that sustains it. Until we rebuild a culture that values books over trends, reflection over reaction and art over appearance, a Nobel for a Pakistani writer will remain a distant dream.
Yet dreams begin somewhere, perhaps with a library built, a book club formed, or a poem read aloud. What we need are more communities of kindred minds — like the Dead Poets Society of Pakistan — that can read, discuss and mentor new writers. The fever of reading can return, but only if we dare to catch it again.
The writer is a Peshawar-based researcher who works in the financial sector. He can be reached at: alifurqan647gmail.com