One of the Strangest Writing Assignments Ever: Write for People Who Haven’t Been Born Yet

Would you write a book knowing nobody would read it in your lifetime? No, this isn’t a trick question; it’s already happening. Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s Future Library in Oslo invites writers to submit manuscripts that will remain unread until 2114.

The project is an unusual example of preserving literature for future generations. It is an artwork about time, trust and uncertainty, with literature as its medium.

Most writing addresses a known audience. For instance, we have some idea of our readers’ vocabulary, interests and the references they’ll understand. Future Library removes that familiarity, leaving an uneasy question: who are you writing for when you can’t picture your readers at all?

What is the Future Library, and how does it work?

It began in 2014, when 1,000 Norwegian spruce trees were planted in a forest near Oslo. In 2114, they are intended to be harvested to make paper for a special anthology containing 100 literary contributions.

Each year, an invited author contributes an unpublished manuscript. The work is handed over at a ceremony in the forest, where its title is revealed but its contents remain a secret.

The manuscripts are preserved in the Silent Room at Oslo’s Deichman Bjørvika library. Visitors can see the authors’ names and manuscript titles, but the texts themselves will remain inaccessible until 2114.

Margaret Atwood was the first author to contribute. David Mitchell, Elif Shafak, Han Kang and Ocean Vuong are among the internationally acclaimed writers who have followed. Indian author Amitav Ghosh and American novelist Tommy Orange handed over their manuscripts in June 2026. In August 2026, American artist Laurie Anderson was announced as the project’s 13th contributor, with her manuscript expected in 2027.

The project involves far more than collecting manuscripts. It also requires a forest to survive, an institution to preserve the writing and future generations to honour an agreement made long before their time.

Is the Future Library really about books?

Scottish artist Katie Paterson created the project, commissioned by Bjørvika Utvikling. The idea came to her when she made a connection between tree rings and chapters, imagining how writers’ thoughts might become part of the trees themselves.

As Paterson explained in an interview with Visit Norway:

“Almost as if the trees absorb the writer’s words like air or water, and the tree rings become chapters spaced out over the years to come.”

The forest and the manuscripts will grow older together. While the authors continue writing, the trees continue growing, eventually becoming the paper on which those words will be printed.

There’s an element of trust here that goes beyond literature. The people who began the project cannot guarantee that the forest, the library or even the publishing practices we know today will survive another century.

Yet the project proceeds on the assumption that someone in the future will care enough to carry it forward.

What if nobody reads it the way the author meant?

This is perhaps the most interesting part of writing for an unknown audience.

A writer in 2014 might have chosen words or phrases that made perfect sense at the time. By 2114, vocabulary may have shifted, cultural references could mean something entirely different, and the technology characters use might seem as unfamiliar to future readers as a telegram does to many of us today.

What seems obvious to us about work, family, politics or climate might appear quaint or even alarming to future readers. Someone in 2114 might find these manuscripts extraordinary, confusing or outdated, and the authors may no longer be around to explain what they meant.

But readers have always interpreted books through the experiences of their own time. We continue reading literature written centuries ago, often finding meanings that its authors could never have anticipated.

Future Library makes that distance between writer and reader unusually deliberate. Its authors know from the beginning that the world receiving their work will be different from the one in which they wrote it.

And perhaps future readers will notice things about our present that we don’t recognise ourselves.

What does Amitav Ghosh make of it?

Indian author Amitav Ghosh was selected as the project’s 12th contributor in 2025. He handed over his manuscript, Letter to My Grandson, on 28 June 2026.

His involvement is particularly interesting because much of his writing already deals with how human actions shape the world across generations.

Ghosh has spoken about the difficulty of imagining an audience that does not yet exist. In an interview with Bloomberg, he explained that his first instinct was to imagine what the world of 2114 might look like. After several attempts, he realised how impossible such predictions could be.

After all, consider how much has changed within our own lifetimes. Technology, politics, communication and even the ways we read have undergone enormous shifts. Trying to predict another 88 years would be a challenge for any writer.

Rather than attempting to forecast the future, Ghosh decided to draw on his own experiences and write what he felt he needed to say.

His manuscript’s title also gives the project a personal dimension. At the handover ceremony, Ghosh explained that his grandson, born in 2025, would be 89 in 2114 and might actually get to read the letter.

Unlike most of the project’s intended readers, his grandson is someone who already exists. Yet Ghosh cannot know the person he will become or the world in which he might eventually encounter the manuscript.

It raises another question about writing for the future. Do writers need to imagine the world their readers will inhabit, or is it enough to record something meaningful about the world they know?

Ghosh has also reflected on the project in his essay The Echo of Deep Time. He connects the experiment to our tendency to think in short timeframes, even in literature and the arts. Future Library asks writers to consider a much longer period, one that extends beyond their own lives and immediate concerns.

What does the Future Library leave us with?

The project’s beauty lies in its trust and hope that the manuscripts will be protected, the forest will survive and future readers will honour the promise made to them.

Of course, there is no guarantee that people in 2114 will find every manuscript meaningful. Some works may feel surprisingly familiar, while others could require explanations of a world that has long disappeared.

The manuscripts might also become records of how people in the early 21st century understood their lives, fears and surroundings. Even an ordinary detail about daily life could become interesting to someone reading it a century later.

No one knows what the world will look like in 2114, and that uncertainty goes beyond books. It also shapes how we preserve culture and what we choose to leave behind.

When the Future Library finally opens its manuscripts to readers, those works will carry the voices of people who wrote long before their audience existed. But their meanings will still be open to interpretation.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about writing for the future is that you can preserve the words, but never the meaning they will eventually acquire.