This 100-year library in Oslo is beautiful — but we won't be able to read its books until the year 2114
Margaret Atwood and Elif Shafak are among the authors that have contributed works to the project, which is called Future Library.
At this year’s Hay Festival, I was lucky enough to see two out of three of my favourite contemporary female authors — Elizabeth Strout and Maggie O’Farrell. As for the third, alas I was three years behind the curve. Margaret Atwood’s last appearance on stage at Hay was in 2023 and there is no knowing when the 86-year-old Canadian might be back.
Her name cropped up again a couple of weeks later, however, over coffee with a Norwegian travel colleague whose company, Up Norway, designs highly personalised, expertly delivered trips to Norway and the Nordic countries (take note should a holiday to that part of the world be on your agenda). She told me of an extraordinary literary art project in Oslo, now in its 12th year, and I was instantly hooked.
Future Library is the brainchild of Scottish conceptual artist Katie Paterson, who has been doing weird and wonderful things in the art world for several years — often in collaboration with scientists and scientific researchers.
The artist Katie Paterson (pictured) has worked alongside authors such as Margaret Atwood (above) on Future Library.
Among her notable works are the broadcast sound of melting glaciers, a map of some 27,000 dead stars and a lightbulb designed to simulate the experience of moonlight. A library, by comparison, might seem somewhat mundane.
Paterson’s library, however, is not exactly as it might sound. This is a 100-year ‘living artwork’, commissioned as part of Oslo’s cultural Slow Space public art programme, with a distinct beginning, middle and end.
The project started in 2014 with the felling of an area of trees within the Nordmarka Forest on the edge of the city to make way for the planting of 1,000 spruce saplings. The felled trees were to be used in the construction of a special ‘Silent Room’ within the Deichman Bjørvika Public Library where Future Library would be housed; the new spruce trees would be used in 2114, 100 years on, as paper for the printing of the library’s contents.
Each year, from 2014 onwards, a writer of global standing was, and will be, asked by the trustees of Future Library to contribute an original written work.
The middle part is where the project takes a more intriguing turn. Each year, from 2014 onwards, a writer of global standing would be asked by the trustees of Future Library (an evolving group as time goes by) to contribute an original written work of any length and in any literary genre, with only one catch. Apart from its title, each work would remain unread and unpublished, sealed within a thin, illuminated glass drawer of the Silent Room’s walls, until 2114, when a limited-edition anthology of all the manuscripts would be printed.
First up to contribute to Future Library was Atwood, with a work titled Scribbler Moon. We know no more than that. Since then, nine further writers, including the brilliant Turkish-British author Elif Shafak, have submitted manuscripts and two more, American writers Tommy Orange and Amitav Ghosh, joined the fold on June 28. Their handing-over ceremony, as did those before them, took place amid the spruce-tree plantation in Nordmarka Forest, their works representing 2024 and 2025 respectively.
The big reveal of 2026’s writer is expected imminently. The Silent Room, therefore, its curvaceous interior fashioned from 100 concentric layers of wood like the growth rings of a tree, now has 12 full drawers with another 88 to go.
How many of these, one wonders, will be filled with manuscripts by people who are yet to be born and how many people alive today will ever get to read them? The City of Oslo and the Future Library Trust have signed a 100-year contract guaranteeing the protection of Nordmarka Forest, the Silent Room and the manuscripts, but who is to say how the world might have changed by 2114. Perhaps humans won’t be reading books anymore, perhaps libraries will be a thing of the past and perhaps, God forbid, no one will care a fig about Atwood.
This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
