Behind the Book — Episode 122
Constellation Novels: Olga Tokarczuk on Writing in Fragments
Nora Ellis in conversation with Olga Tokarczuk
Recorded July 22, 2026 · 01:55
https://behindthebookfm.com/episodes/flights

This interview is a voiced dramatisation written by our team, drawn from the
author's publicly documented remarks on craft.

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[00:00] Nora Ellis:
Your novels are made of fragments. Why does that shape feel truer to you than a single continuous plot?

[00:06] Olga Tokarczuk:
Because that's how we actually experience the world — in shards, in interruptions, on trains, between messages. I call it a constellation novel. You give the reader points of light and their mind draws the lines, and the shape they draw is part of the book. A tidy plot pretends life arrives in order. It doesn't.

[00:31] Nora Ellis:
Was that difficult to sell to publishers?

[00:35] Olga Tokarczuk:
At first, yes. I was told readers want a hero and a chase. I think readers are far more curious than that; they simply aren't asked very often. And a fragment has an enormous advantage — you can put a seventeenth-century anatomist next to a woman losing her family in an airport and the collision does the work of forty pages of explanation.

[00:59] Nora Ellis:
You worked as a psychologist. What did that leave in the writing?

[01:04] Olga Tokarczuk:
A tolerance for other people's logic. Everybody's reasoning makes perfect sense from inside; the job is to stand inside it long enough to describe it without mockery. That's clinical training and it's also, I think, the entire moral technique of a novel.

[01:20] Nora Ellis:
What is writing for?

[01:22] Olga Tokarczuk:
To practise tenderness towards what isn't ourselves. I mean animals, objects, strangers, the dead. Literature is the only instrument we have that lets you be someone else for a few hours and come back changed. That's not decoration. That's a kind of civic equipment.

[01:41] Nora Ellis:
One piece of advice?

[01:44] Olga Tokarczuk:
Keep a notebook of things that have no use yet. Most of my books began as a page of unrelated notes that refused to be thrown away.