One book at a time, year after year since 2014, to complete a library Of 100 unpublished texts that no one will be able to open before 2114. Here, in the Deichman bibliotekthe public library of Oslo in Norway, has existed for 12 years now.Silent Room”, that mysterious and enchanting place where – precisely – 100 books will be kept for 100 years.
It is the Library of the future, the Future Library or Framtidsbiblioteket to quote the Norwegians, a project born from an idea by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson and realized thanks to the financial support of a foundation and the administration of Oslo, which is committed to protecting the forest (the room is built with wood from from an area of the Nordmarka forest, where in 2014 Paterson had a thousand spruce trees planted and in about ninety years those same trees will be used to obtain the paper on which to print the hundred manuscripts).
The purpose? Please contact future generationsso that they do not forget the role of humanity throughout the passage of time and at the same time allow the development of long-term thinking.
How the Future Library works
Every year a person is chosen to write a story or story of which only the title is known. The manuscript is placed in a glass drawer among those found on the walls of the room. Here he will remain until 2114, when all and 100 will be published together.
The first author to write a story for the Library of the Future in 2014 was the Canadian Margaret Atwoodauthor of The Handmaid’s Tale and winner of the Booker Prize in 2019, the most important British literary prize. Then, among others, there were the Icelandic poet Sjón, the Turkish writer Elif Shafak and the South Korean writer Han Kang, who in 2016 won the Booker International Prize, dedicated to fiction translated into English from the United Kingdom.
View this post on Instagram
Among them all there is also Han Kang, the South Korean writer who has just been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature, for her ability to give voice, with a “intense poetic prose“, to the wounds of history and the fragility of human existence.
