12 years in: Writing for the Future Library

Join Norwegian curator and cultural producer, Anne Beate Hovind and Kathryn Favelle, as they discuss The Future Library project.

Twelve years into the century long literary artwork Future Library, created by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, producer and chair of the Future Library Trust Anne Beate Hovind shares the twelfth chapter of a project that will one day comprise one hundred.

Rooted in Oslo, Norway, the work grows, quite literally, alongside a forest planted in Nordmarka in 2014, whose trees will become the paper on which these sealed manuscripts will finally be printed in 2114.

Over the years, writers including Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Han Kang, Karl Ove Knausgård, Ocean Vuong, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Judith Schalansky and Valeria Luiselli have entrusted their unseen texts to the project. This June, Tommy Orange and Amitav Ghosh will join them, handing over their manuscripts in a ceremony in Oslo.

Written for readers who will live a century from now, the Future Library unfolds slowly and tenderly across time. It invites us to consider authorship, trust, and the long arc of cross-generational responsibility, as well as the climate and nature crises shaping our shared future. It asks what it means to write for an audience we will never meet, and how literature might carry care, imagination and solidarity across generations.