If a famous writer’s work isn’t opened for 100 years, will it still have an impact?

That’s something Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and many other authors contributing to the rather hopeful Future Library project will never find out.

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The concept works like this: a forest has been planted in Norway, and that forest will supply the paper to print an anthology of texts 100 years from now. During that time, one author every year will contribute a text. Those texts — literature or poetry — will remain secret, in trust, unpublished, until 2014. Their length is up to the writers to decide.

Margaret Atwood on the Library Project

“This project, at least, believes the human race will still be around in a hundred years!” says Atwood in a statement. “Future Library is bound to attract a lot of attention over the decades, as people follow the progress of the trees, note what takes up residence in and around them and try to guess what the writers have put into their sealed boxes.”

Atwood, the inaugural writer in the project, has already begun working on her contribution, which will be handed over at a special ceremony in 2015.

“It is my dream that Margaret Atwood is writing for Future Library. I imagine her words growing through the trees, an unseen energy, activated and materialized, the tree rings becoming chapters in a book,” said Katie Paterson, the artist behind the library.

The concept is described as a “public artwork” that will “unfold over the next 100 years in Oslo.”

The City of Oslo has donated a forest in Nordmarka just outside the city, which was planted with 1,000 trees this past May to be used in the project.

“Tending the forest and ensuring its preservation for the 100-year duration of the artwork finds a conceptual counterpoint in the invitation extended to each writer: to conceive and produce a work in the hopes of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future,” is how the project is described on Scottish artist Paterson’s website.

The manuscripts will be held in trust in a specially designed room in a new library, the Deichmanske Public Library, which will open in 2018 in Bjørvika, Oslo. The room will be lined with wood from the forest.

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